


to the end of the night

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Louis-centric, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-02 12:46:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8668180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: “Why were you going to kiss me?” Louis asks, instead. It feels very important to get an answer to this. Louis thinks it might affect things quite a bit. There’s so much he wants to talk to Niall about, too, like how he’s thinking of seeing a counselor and isn’t that wild and how much older Louis’s family is and how everywhere Louis went back in Donny there were posters of Niall’s stupid handsome face, and Louis was so proud of him. His heart feels like it's lodged in his throat. He waits for Niall to say something.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "One of the questions I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street is "How do you do it?" In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more importantly, why. DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for...fame? ...love? ...admiration? ...attention? ...women? ...sex? ...and oh, yeah...a buck. Then...if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just...don't...quit...burning." - bruce springsteen, born to run (2016)
> 
> in loving memory of the mothers we've lost.
> 
> [(playlist)](https://playmoss.com/en/shutupsavanna/playlist/to-the-end-of-the-night)

Even with the air conditioning on full blast, the heat of a California summer and thousands of cars idling in backed-up traffic on the highway seeps into Louis’s Range Rover and sticks his shirt to his back. He leans forward and peels his shirt away from his skin, though it doesn’t help much when he just presses himself right back against the seat.

He’d paid extra for leather seats ‘cos they’re fancy, and it’s what luxury cars ought to have, right? But right about now, he’d kill for the good old polyester seats his Grandad had, with little stubbed-out cigarette burns seared into the fabric like acne scars. Louis jabs at the button on the door and his window rolls up a precious few inches, the smell of LA – exhaust, gasoline, smog, fast food – abruptly cut off and replaced with recycled air. It’s cooler, at least.

“How you doing back there?” Louis asks, pushing himself up in his seat so that he can look into the rearview mirror. Freddie’s sat in his little booster seat with his sticky fingers curled around a dripping ice cream cone, his mouth stained a shocking shade of electric blue. The gridlocked traffic creeps forward a spare few feet, and Louis lifts his foot off the brake without pressing on the gas.

“Good,” says Freddie.

“Good,” Louis parrots in Fred’s American accent, and Freddie laughs, his gaze trained out the window. Louis had had the kids’ CDs on for him earlier, but then he’d had to take a call on Bluetooth, and now Freddie’s far off in his own little world. It never stops being fascinating to Louis where kids’ brains go when they’re totally checked out. He remembers it, vaguely, the way a grown-up remembers being a kid. Part of him wishes he could follow Freddie into his little fairy land.

Louis turns the radio up just a few notches, not enough to bother his kid, just enough for it to fill the car. He used to have such a mad thing about listening to music in the car that he makes himself cringe, now…and turn the radio up higher. There’s no better place to listen to music, is all, except maybe a concert hall – and most people don’t spend every day in one of them. Not anymore.

The Sheeran song on the radio transitions fluidly into Niall’s latest single with a brief pre-recorded intro from Niall himself and a reminder that he’ll be in town soon with his whole caravan to play a couple of shows. Louis’s grip on the steering wheel eases up as Niall sinks into the first verse. It’s like muscle memory, a bit; if the boys in the band are singing, then Louis doesn’t have anywhere else to be but in that moment.

Louis lifts his head and glances into the backseat, his mouth open, to find Freddie fast asleep, his ice cream cone melting onto his shorts. Louis swallows the words down and reaches back to peel the cone out of his son’s grip and drop it in the plastic bag he keeps on the floorboards of the passenger seat just for moments like this.

Niall’s song is long over by the time traffic finally starts moving and Louis steers off the highway and to his exit. His voice lingers in Louis’s head, though, soft and sweet and familiar, like a breath of cool air.

 

***

 

To: _1 direction_

From: Nialler lad

 

_Hiya lads ! Anyone coming to my LA show ?._

To: _1 direction_

From: Boy Payno

 

_I cant I’m in Japan :( red sum signs for me bro!_

To: _1 direction_

From: Nialler lad

 

_I absolutely won’t Payno . HARRY_

 

To: _1 direction_

From: Harry

 

_Sorry, Niall, I’ve got a premier that night. Next time. All the love. x H._

Louis watches the email conversation unfold over the course of the day. Niall’s first email comes bright and early at eight o’clock in the morning. Louis’s thumb hovers over the reply button, an answer on his fingertips, and then he gives himself a shake and hustles to throw his legs over the side of the bed and get the Keurig brewing so he can get the dogs out for a walk before one of them pisses on the kitchen floor.

He’s lucky today – nobody has an accident, and he’s out the door only fifteen minutes late, which is essentially on time for him. He cruises up to the studio and checks his reflection in the glass door: his hair dried a little sideways, and his shirt isn’t perfectly unwrinkled, but it’ll do.

His current band is a couple of kids out of Missouri or Milwaukee or one of those random places in America that he could never keep straight even when he and the boys were there. The tour bus would be rumbling over thousands and thousands of miles of American prairie land and pull to a stop seemingly in the middle of nowhere, where a few thousand people would gather to watch them perform and then presumably disperse back into the wilderness. America’s weird like that, people always struggling to close all that distance, Louis still thinks.

Louis adjusts a slider on the audio mixer without needing to, then grimaces and puts it back the way it was. The poor kids are in the recording booth right now having a real go over the lad’s shitty tambourine playing which, really, the tambourine. Is there even such a thing as good tambourine playing? Louis lets them have at it, though. He knows from experience: bands that can’t tolerate a good squabble don’t stand a chance.

His phone buzzes with another email. Louis checks it surreptitiously, not wanting to seem unprofessional even though his clients are currently wrestling over a tambourine. Niall’s last message has just come through.

Louis stares at the words for so long his screen goes dark. _HARRY,_ he’d written. Louis moves his thumb to the fingerprint scanner and unlocks his phone again just so that he can stare at his screen some more. Something about the exchange settles in his stomach strangely, like Chinese takeaway leftovers on the third day.

Someone knocks on the glass, and Louis looks up to find the lass won the tambourine, her face still flushed from the struggle. She motions to the sound system, so Louis wheels his chair around so that he’s sat behind it like a flight commander for mission control and gets back to work.

Briana’s got the little lad for the rest of the week, so Louis drives around for a bit after he’s finished at the studio, watching the way the sunlight glints off of Los Angeles’s skyscrapers like butter sliding down nonstick frying pans the size of space ships. Sometimes Louis thinks LA is the most beautiful city in the world, and sometimes he looks at the buildings reaching up toward the sky like the stubby fingers of some long-buried god, and he feels very small. Tonight Louis sticks to the back streets, his hands and feet steering him round.

The instinct comes to him, as it does more often than he’d like to admit, to give Danielle a ring. He can imagine the conversation. “Hey, love, I’ve just done work, d’you want to have dinner?” He doesn’t often miss the big stuff so much; it’s always the little things, like the tiny bottles of hand lotion she was forever pulling out of gift bags from one fancy do or another, that Louis’s left finding in the loo and his glove compartment. They turn up where he least expects them like a sucker punch.

Little things. Hah. Oh, speaking of, Louis thinks, and checks his phone. No follow-up emails from any of the other lads. Louis’s pressing his thumb to the name on his favorites menu without much more thought, Fall Out Boy’s _Save Rock and Roll_ fading out over the car’s speakers as Louis’s Bluetooth relays the sound of his phone call.

“Hello?” Niall answers.

His voice is as crisp and bright as an apple, and Louis’s started smiling even as he says, “Oi, hello, then. So, what, only Harry gets a shoutout in our emails? I thought I was special, Neil.”

Dry as a bone, Niall replies, “You’re all special to me, Louis, obviously.”

It’s not quite what Louis was hoping for – an, _Of course you’re special, Lou, you’re the best_ – but it’ll do. Appeased, Louis says, “Good, I’m glad that’s settled.” He catches sight of himself in the glare on his window, a mirror reverse of him sat in his driver’s seat at a red light. He looks tired, his face lined in ways he would’ve sworn took longer, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It shouldn’t be a bad thing. Louis flips his blinker on, checks traffic, and swings a right turn, headed toward home. He’s hungry, and he could use a shower.

“Me too,” says Niall. The connection is poor, or Niall’s somewhere busy; Louis can hear a sound like static, the heavy weight of Niall’s breathing, the low hum of conversation somewhere nearby. Louis starts to ask him where he is, and then stops. “Reckon this means you’re coming, then?”

“Only for a backstage pass,” Louis answers, his foot easing down on the gas pedal as the highway opens up before him. He’ll be home in less than ten. “And none of that front row stuff, I’ve seen your fans, I’ll be crushed.” 

Niall agrees, “Fair, that is,” and then he says, “I’ll plan on seeing you, Tommo.” He rings off with a cheery farewell just a moment later, called away by something to do with work. Louis parks his car in the driveway and sits for a moment in the still quiet of his car, the engine popping in the cool that settles over LA even in the summer when the sun finally sinks beneath the horizon.

He had this daydream, not that he’d admit it to anyone, of coming home to this house and finding Danielle inside with Freddie and maybe a kid of their own, a little buddy for Freddie to grow up alongside. Maybe he’d even have just come home from tour, his arms laden with gifts he picked up all over the world, and there’d be an absolute clusterfuck in the doorway as everybody scrambled to hug him first and take a look at their presents, Danielle leaning over the hubbub to kiss his stubbly mouth.

The sun sinks a little lower beneath the horizon. Louis’s stomach rumbles. Louis read somewhere that Los Angeles sunsets are some of the most beautiful in the world because there’s so much air pollution. He goes back and forth on whether it’s worth it. On nights like these, when the blue-black velvet of the sky undulates overhead like a blanket over the top of a pillow fort, he knows.

He opens the door, climbs out of the seat, and goes into his house to eat dinner. Back at it again tomorrow.

 

***

 

Louis should’ve known that things weren’t going to go according to plan when his first meeting on the day he’s meant to go to Niall’s show runs long. It’s like a snowball effect, or dominoes, or something else that doesn’t describe the absolute shittiness of his day as a result.

Meeting one runs late, so Louis has to haul ass to get across down to Modest!’s satellite office, which is located square in the middle of bumfuck shit traffic Los Angeles. He shows up to his meeting red-faced and sweating, so he feels pretty confident that he’s not made a very good impression on the new act his label’s hoping to scoop from Columbia Records, which is just _brilliant._

Then he has to stop for gas on the way to that duo’s next recording session, and of course he puts his foot down on the blacktop and directly into a puddle of spilled gasoline. He’s paranoid the whole time he gasses up his car that a stray spark is going to send the whole place up in flames, and the smell of petrol only really hits him when he’s sat back in the driver’s seat but feeling like he must be on an oil rig somewhere. He’s got a pounding headache before lunch, and the rest of the day doesn’t go much more smoothly.

The end result is, Louis’s stuck in the most boring budget meeting in the entire world as the hour hand on the clock creeps up to Niall’s opener, through their set, and into the evening hours. Louis never really has anywhere he’d rather be than work except with Freddie, but sitting through this bullshit meeting has him tugging at his collar, imaginary ants crawling all over his skin.

When Simon finally rings off from the middle of the goddamn night in England, Louis jumps out of his seat like his arse is on fire and hustles toward his car. Light shines out of windows many stories high as Louis presses his foot down on the gas pedal, his car speeding down the highway, a tense little ball of something unpleasant wadded up in the middle of his chest. Louis steers round the back of the venue and flashes his label credentials to get in through the rear entrance, which saves him a few minutes finding parking and walking up to the arena.

Even then, he’s only in time for the last couple of songs of Niall’s encore. Louis finds his way to the side of the stage. Niall’s stage hands are gathered on the wings to watch him perform, his band jamming out behind him. Louis creeps closer to the fringes of their cluster; a couple of them turn to look, and wordlessly shuffle over a bit to give him room. Louis watches Niall glance over his shoulder to his drummer, who gives a little nod, and the band cruises effortlessly into a medley Louis would bet real money isn’t rehearsed.

It shouldn’t be like this, but Louis feels strangely small and alone here in an arena One Direction might’ve played, once upon a time, and possibly did. The knot of tension in Louis’s chest coils tighter, his stomach sinking. He wanted this so much. He had this once. Louis fights the feeling that he’s going to ralph and checks his phone. Niall’s texted him while he was waiting to go onstage.

 _See ya backstage Louis ?_ Then, about an hour later, _Gig’s starting soon ! Not going to show off for you promise_ , and then, a final text, just a few minutes ago. He probably tried to get a hold of him while the crowd was roaring his name, crying out for him to come back on and give them a few more songs. Something heavy twists in Louis’s stomach. _Hope everything’s okay,_ Niall’s sent. It makes him sick to his stomach, honestly, the thought of Niall worrying about him while Louis’s wiling away his time in an office building, in a meeting he couldn’t care less about.

Christ, he’s missed the lad, is all.

Louis clears his throat, swallows, and taps back, _Meeting ran long, sorry mate!_ He’s halfway across the car park when he slips his phone out of his pocket and adds a regretful, _Sorry, lad_ , that doesn’t feel like nearly enough. Louis yanks his car door open and drops into the seat, his mouth twisted in a way that he knows makes him look a little feral. God, what’s he doing? He should get out of this car and go back in there and tell Niall that he smashed it. He’s not sure why that idea feels intolerable, painful, even.

While Louis’s sat there worrying himself in half, Niall texts him back. _Ok ._ Then, _after party ?_

Louis leans his forehead against the driving wheel. Oh, Nialler, he thinks, not without a rush of deep affection. He can’t say no – doesn’t really want to, either. Something about this place, this industry, grabbed hold of Louis when he was young and never let go. It keeps drawing him back in, heartbreak after heartbreak. _Love it,_ he sends back, with the upside down smiling emoji. Louis starts his car and pulls out of the parking lot, his heart caught up somewhere between his lungs and his throat.

Niall’s after party is at the hotel where he and his band are crashing for their stay in LA. The weirdest déjà vu plays out in front of Louis’s eyes as he steers his car into the car park and the valet takes his place behind the wheel.

Louis walks up the covered walkway and into the hotel lobby. Something, part instinct, part memory, tells him that Niall’s tour bus must be parked in the back, and Louis half-turns, thinking of the tour buses he grew up, fell in love, and lost friends on over the years.

The weirdest thing about One Direction, he’ll always know, is that it’ll only ever make sense to the few of them. He shakes his head and continues on to the lift. A girl and her beau share the lift with him, their arms curled possessively and charmingly around each other’s waists, and Louis could pinch them both, he could. Louis wrestles with himself till they get off on the eighth floor. Meanwhile, he stays on till the lift gets all the way to the top.

The party’s already underway when Louis steps out of the lift and directly into the hotel suite Niall’s label or reps probably got for him. He’s never been much for throwing himself parties unless they were birthday parties, and then so many of his friends were friends that they were more like catch-ups for everyone invited. Louis curls and uncurls his fingers, rocking on his heels in the entryway for a moment like he’s fresh again.

Then he squares his shoulders, and sallies forth to grab a drink from the spacious kitchen that’s filled to bursting with coolers overflowing with bottles of beer on ice and counters brimming with bottles of hard liquor. Louis pours himself a sloppy Jack and coke, substituting coke for a healthy slug of Dr Pepper. It’s something Danielle got him on, back when they’d go out sometimes and drink and dance, and – anyway, he should stop thinking about that tonight if he wants to have any fun.

In fact, Louis does, but he mostly just wants to see Niall again. It’s weird the way missing him, missing all the lads, slips his mind till he sees him again, and then the wealth of love he has for them pours right over. For Niall, anyway. Louis hasn’t seen the other lads in…well, a while.

As it happens, Louis doesn’t see Niall for most of the night. Louis mills about chatting up everyone he bumps into, some faces familiar from running the LA circle for the past couple of years, some fresh-faced and new to the industry, and some old and withered in a way that Louis instinctively wants to draw away from, wants to get closer to.

He runs his mouth the whole while, talking big with his hands so that Jack and soda goes sloshing over the rim of his cup and onto his sleeve more than once. He sounds sloppier than he looks, and he looks pretty well-sloshed, but he’s not, really. He can feel it in his stomach, a fire no alcohol can put out, and the desperate need to prove himself to these people over and over again. His solo career tanked but let me tell you about these kids I’ve got in the studio, lads! Are they the next One Direction? Well, there’ll never be another one of those…

He refills his drink a couple of times, enough that he knows he’ll have to risk driving tipsy or call a cab and come back for his car in the morning. It’s fine. Louis’s planning on staying late tonight even though he knows he shouldn’t; he’s got more meetings in the morning, demos he ought to go over, paperwork to sign his name to. He’s a grown-up now, and work isn’t rolling out of bed and into a makeup chair anymore.

He sees Niall a few times. Louis spots him nodding seriously with a woman who keeps touching his wrist, Niall’s mouth set in that way that means he’s going to break and run for it the moment he gets a window. Louis gets it. He lets him go. Next time he sees Niall, he’s stood amongst his band and a couple of beautiful girls who look to be the guitarist’s and the bassist’s girlfriends, his head tipped back. He laughs the same, still, a sound weirdly like light.

Sometimes, Louis thinks, it’s enough just to know the boy are still out there, being exactly who Louis thought they were.

He slips outside for a smoke on the balcony when the heat of the party mixes with the alcohol in his bloodstream; Louis knows himself too well not to know that if he doesn’t stop now, he’ll wind up with a lampshade on his head dancing the Macarena naked on a tabletop, so he saves himself from it for once. Sober Louis: 1, Drunk Louis: very, very many.

Louis holds the cigarette between his lips and cups his hands around the tiny flame of his lighter so that a phantom breeze off the Pacific doesn’t snub out his light. He inhales deeply, pockets his lighter, and leans his elbows on the banister running around the edge of the balcony to blow out a jet stream of cigarette smoke.

Niall’s penthouse hotel suite favors Louis a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Neon light spills out of tattoo shops and bars – the only two places left open this late at night in LA – onto the streets at ground level. Higher up, there’s just darkened skyscraper windows, the occasional office left lit so that Louis can see a dark monitor on a desktop. The sky is a soft shade of velvet, and Louis can’t make out any stars.

“Imagine finding you out here,” says a familiar voice. Louis glances over his shoulder to find Niall slipping out through the sliding glass doors, his hair a side-swept mess, his cheeks flushed with alcohol. Louis’s brain does a mental reboot in the split second that he looks at Niall; his shoulders are broader than Louis remembers, and he’s filled out more, and his hair is shockingly dark. Under his half-melted quiff there’s still Niall’s blue eyes, and a resting half-smile. He looks every bit the pop star: beautiful, talented, touched. Louis tells himself not to be bitter. “Figured you’d be in the middle of the party.” He slides the door shut behind him, though it does little to cut down on the party noise.

“That’s you,” Louis contradicts him. He stubs his cigarette out on the metal banister and drops it into a planter – oops, he’ll grab that later – and turns to open his arms.

Niall hugs just the same as ever, though he smells different now under the familiar musk of sweat and beer. Maybe it’s a new cologne. Louis starts to say, “Besides, I’m an old man now,” but it suddenly feels too true, so he doesn’t.

Niall grins, a little abashed, and leans his hip against the banister next to Louis. Louis puts his elbows back on it, strangely conscious of how awful it’d be if the whole thing suddenly gave away and Niall plunged to his death. It’s a stupid thing to think about. “Yeah, well,” Niall says. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with Niall whether he’s not talking much ‘cos he’d prefer a bit of quiet or if he’s just got too much to say. Zayn always used to know, but – anyway. “You’re having a good time, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Louis says immediately. Is he? “Ain’t no party like an Irish party,” Louis follows up with, a little hopelessly.

“Good,” Niall just says, and it settles over Louis how absolutely perfunctory this conversation is, Niall the good host checking on one of his party guests.

It makes Louis feel a little desperate, for reasons he can’t explain. “I’m sorry I missed your show,” he starts, and cringes internally so hard his face’d get stuck that way. He doesn’t want to bring up how fucking disappointed he is, how disappointed Niall must be in him, not while he’s got Niall stood here in front of him and it feels like every word counts. “I hear you on the radio all the time.”

Niall smiles. “Christ, do you?” He shakes his head. “That’s mad. I remember playing you that ‘This Town’ demo – was it, what, three years ago now? Four?”

Louis nods. “Mad,” he agrees softly.

The sliding door opens and one of Niall’s bottomless supply of Irish cousins sticks his head out to holler, “Niall! Get back in here, lad, you’re missing all the fun!” He disappears back inside, his voice trailing off into the thick of it. Thumping bass and drunken shouts and many feet on an impromptu dance floor filter out onto the balcony louder than before, and Louis knows his time is running short.

“Piss off,” Niall says, no real anger in his voice. He takes half a step away, though, even as his eyes swing back round to Louis.

Louis offers him his best cavalier grin and a nod. “Alright then, pop star. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Niall nods definitively, like Louis doesn’t know the way it is. How absolutely packed his schedule will be till his tour’s done, and then there’s always fall and winter promo stuff to attend to, awards shows, too much to do in one day for days and weeks on end. These few minutes are probably all Niall could spare. Louis knows that. It’s just the way it is. “You will,” says Niall. Then, “Have a good night, let me know if you need anything.” 

“Will do,” says Louis. Niall slips through the door his cousin left half-open and into the party. He leaves the door open behind him.

Louis would like nothing more than to get his keys, go home, and pack a bowl, but he hangs out for a bit longer. Partly he doesn’t want to be impolite; partly he doesn’t want Niall to think he went home right away. Is he having fun? Sort of. He used to love stuff like this; the parties the band threw are some of his favorite ever, hands-down. But it’s a different feeling when you know everyone, when it feels like it could be a house party back home except the booze isn’t stolen from your parents’ liquor cabinet and no one’s afraid of the cops busting up the joint. It’s different now, though Louis knows some of the label reps and industry people. It’s not his party.

Finally, he says goodbye to a few people he sort of knows, some of whom seem out of their heads drunk, a couple of whom he’s pretty sure will be able to answer in case anyone asked if he stayed long and if he had a good time. Louis takes the lift down to ground level and exits through the double doors, though he draws to a halt at the front when no valet steps up to bring his car back around. Louis dawdles on the sidewalk for a bit, burning through another cigarette and wondering whether he ought to go back in and ask the concierge where his car is parked and if anyone can give him a lift.

In the end, he decides to call an Uber. He’ll pick his car up tomorrow. He probably shouldn’t drive anyway. He’s not drunk anymore but he has the faint stirrings of a hangover, one of those ones that comes from not having enough to drink, or maybe the buzz just wearing off too fast. Louis toes at the slick blacktop with his trainer while he waits for his ride, his left hand stuffed into his pocket, his pits and the small of his back uncomfortable and sweaty.

The car’s there so soon that Louis has to suck down the remainder of his cigarette too fast, the smoke curdling in his lungs, the tender inner edges of his fingers singed by the cherry. Louis flicks the butt to the curb and climbs into the car, and leaves the party behind him like just another stop on tour.

 

***

 

Briana stirs the pancake batter tensely. Louis didn’t even know that a person could stir tensely, but he’s looking at her now, and she’s very definitely stirring the batter like it’s done her some personal wrong. Maybe it’s the way she keeps jabbing the whisk into the bowl like she’s imagining herself stabbing someone, probably Louis, with a knife.

Louis swallows, musters his courage, and forges ahead. “I want more time with him,” he says. He tries not to make his voice sound so pleading, to make it firm and concrete instead. He’s never been good at meeting his problems head-on, though. “I know we have an agreement, but that was made up ages ago, Bria – you can see how things have changed.”

Briana sets down the mixing bowl and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of sweet-smelling batter in its place. “Is this about him starting pre-k?” she asks. She turns her back on Louis, doing him the small favor of not seeing his face, to rummage through the pantry. Louis balks and swallows and casts about for the perfect witty response. Briana’s back and looking at him before he comes up with it. “It’s just for a few hours a day, a few days a week, Lou.”

Louis struggles with himself for a moment and then, like usual, loses. “I’ll never see him again,” he says. It’s not true, and Louis knows it, but he has to explain anyway. “He’ll do pre-k and then whatever you call it here, kindergarten, or primary school, and there won’t – we won’t –” Louis stops himself. There won’t be any more waking up to Freddie crawling into his bed to poke his dad’s face till Louis gets up and drives them to McDonald’s for the best worst breakfast, and Louis won’t be able to make plans and have the biggest obstruction to jetting off wherever, anywhere, be Briana. It’ll be, like, this big institutional thing, and…and Louis hated school, and, just.

To her credit, Briana’s simply stood and let Louis say his piece. She’s always let him talk, even when she had absolutely no plans of agreeing with him. “He needs to be ready for kindergarten, Lou. It’s in all the books. He has to be able to do circle time and know his letters and his numbers and things.” Louis starts to cut in, “We could teach him that!” and Briana smoothly continues, “He needs to be around other kids.”

Louis snaps his jaw shut, his brain working pitifully for some sort of reason, or excuse, or something. Christ, and he knows he’ll just be upset with himself later for wanting to find a way out of his kid going to preschool.

A tiny, terrible part of him wants to point out that Freddie doesn’t ever have to work, not with Louis’s financial planner getting after him the last few years. He doesn’t need to go to school or do anything at all, really. Jesus, what a miserable thing.

“But if you want,” Briana starts, her voice slow, thoughtful. “If you want, there’s a few weeks left before the program starts.” Louis tries to stuff his hopes down his throat before they burst right out of him, his head on his hand on Briana’s immaculate breakfast counter suddenly a million pounds lighter. “If you want to take him somewhere, just the two of you…” She takes a breath.

Louis could recite what comes next if he was drunk and faded, he knows it so well: “I mean, I want to know where you’re going, and who you’ll be seeing, and I want to Facetime him every day, and you can’t feed him a ton of junk food, and if he wants to come home, you’ll bring him right back.” Louis still holds his breath. “Then I’m okay with that.”

“Bri,” says Louis seriously, “I could kiss you.”

Briana actually smiles. She’s so beautiful, and Louis just forgets sometimes, ‘cos it’s not like that between them. Never was, really, except for that one night. She’s the only person he’s ever loved and stopped loving and begun loving again, and the only person who understands that. “I’d rather you didn’t, thanks,” she says dryly. “Get back to me when we’re done raising the first baby.”

Louis preens a little in spite of himself. “I want our son to grow up knowing he’s loved,” Briana says, her voice soft and intent. She sounds like she’s been thinking about this. Louis knows she’s about to say something hurtful but not to hurt him, and he doesn’t even bother bracing himself for it. “I just wish you could find a way to do that that felt right to you.”

“Bollocks,” Louis says eloquently. He doesn’t know what she means, exactly – Freddie’s his best friend. He lets it go. Sometimes even Louis wants to be let out of the ring.

Briana picks up her whisk again and starts turning the batter significantly more gently. Austin trucks into the kitchen with his phone raised high in his hand, nattering on about some quiz Briana has to take so they’ll know which vegetable they are, or some shit. Louis slides off the edge of his seat and pads into the living room, where Freddie’s stretched out on his stomach on his carpet, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. He colors in his battered coloring book with grave attention.

“Hey, pal,” Louis says, and flops down beside him on the carpet. “What are you drawing?”

“Look,” Freddie answers, so Louis does. In the picture, a humanoid turtle seems to be poised amid a nunchuk fight with a brain in a jar. “That’s Mikey, and that’s Krang. They’re on my new favorite show. He’s kicking his butt,” Freddie says with relish. Louis remembers them, vaguely, from Saturday morning cartoons with the little lad. It’s strangely hard to focus on kids’ TV these days; Louis always ends up thinking it’s mostly rubbish, and then he feels bad for thinking so when Fred loves it so much, so mainly he tries not to think of it at all. “Do you like it?”

“Of course,” Louis says warmly. He threads his fingers through Freddie’s hair gently. “I’ve always been more of a comic book man, though, you know – Iron Man, Spider-Man, all that stuff.” It’s not his first time telling Freddie so, but he’s always bigger than the last time, no longer a drooling little baby with a helmet and a pacifier. He bought Freddie a few comics when he was just a wee thing, but he stuffed the flimsy pages in his mouth and drooled all over them so they had to throw them away. Maybe it’s time Louis tried again.

“Mom says that stuff is violent,” says Freddie, who goes back to scribbling all over the page with his blue crayon. “This is violent, too,” Freddie says thoughtfully. “But Mom says ‘cause they’re not human, it’s okay.”  

Louis grunts agreeably and leans down to press a kiss to the top of Freddie’s head. “I like that,” Louis says, watching Fred color the brain’s skin purple. “Looks cool, like an alien.” He keeps up a commentary on Freddie’s artistic choices till Briana calls for them to come eat, and then Louis manages to fit in a quick pick-up game of basketball with Freddie and Austin and Briana with the hoop in the driveway before he wears out his welcome for the day.

Louis sets Freddie on his shoulders to slam dunk the ball in and they run around in a dizzying circle, Freddie’s hands curled tight enough in Louis’s hair to make his eyes water. He can’t bring himself to ask him to stop.  

Freddie sends Louis home with his drawing of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The bloke’s shell has been colored green and yellow and the brain’s wearing an outfit stained with jam. Louis takes it carefully. “In case anyone tries to kick your butt,” Freddie says. Briana clears her throat. “Long as they’re not people,” he amends himself dutifully. “People don’t hurt each other.” He shoots Louis a conspiratorial wink.

He startles a laugh right out of Louis. It’s the best part of his whole week, probably. “Thanks, lad,” he tells Fred. When he gets home, he sticks Freddie’s latest masterpiece up to the fridge next to a whole collection of other Freddie Tomlinson originals, and he sits down at the table with his laptop and a beer to read all about Fred’s new favorite show.

 

***

 

Louis spends most of July frantically trying to cram six weeks’ worth of work into four weeks. He doubles up on meetings, pushes his bands for more time in the studio, and gets to know every employee at the Starbucks nearest his house by name. He also starts talking to Niall again.

It started like this: Niall rang Louis while Louis was stuck at yet another boring meeting with a bunch of label reps who have to start planning next year’s budget a full six months in advance, which makes half the year Louis’s worst nightmare, and Louis missed the call. He sets a full-on reminder to call Niall back since he checked his phone and got rid of the notification bubble – it’d be real helpful if you could put those back, fuck Apple – and then he hustles into his next meeting, a writing session with John and Julian.

It’s a lot different with them than it used to be. These days when a song veers into anthemic territory, nobody jokes about whether it’ll be a 1D hit or something for Louis’s solo record. Those are someone else’s songs now, someone else’s life. It puts a sour taste in his mouth, like the space between them’s curdled from sweet milk.

Niall’s worked with them since his solo career kicked off, so maybe Louis should ask him, but it just feels…well, it feels more like work with them than it used to. Louis spends most of their writing time looking forward to the half-hour lunch break they allotted themselves so he can kick back in his chair, spin a football on his fingertip, and chat shit. They wind down their writing session with half a song that Louis knows isn’t going to end up being anybody’s smash single, probably not even a filler track on someone’s album. It’s fine. Louis knows you have to write a lot of shit to come up with a good song, he just feels like he’s been writing a lot of shit lately.

Louis comes out of his meeting at a jog so that he can throw himself into his car, throw the car into reverse, and spin out of the car park to a dinner with Ben and James, who have probably cooked up some ridiculous skit they want to brag about, or maybe they have a business suggestion for him. You win two Emmys, suddenly you know everything there is to know about the music industry. Louis shakes his head.

It’s good seeing them all the same. James hasn’t changed a bit since he and Louis used to kick the ball about on the set of Fat Friends. God, that feels like a lifetime ago. The gents are sat at the bar when Louis arrives at the restaurant only ten minutes late. Each is nursing a glass of some brown liquor, a little glaze-eyed and pink-cheeked with laughter. Louis’s phone buzzes with a reminder in his pocket, but he just silences it without looking, he’s so relieved to finally be here after another crushing day.

“You look winded,” Ben observes keenly, once the three of them have been moved from the bar to their own private booth near the back of the restaurant. It doesn’t have the best view of the gardens out front or LA’s sloping view of skyscrapers and neon lights out back, but it provides them privacy, which is the bigger luxury anyway.

“Weathered,” Corden agrees, nodding his sandy-colored head.

“Worn,” Ben says.

Corden narrows his eyes. “Withered,” he says, his soft voice curling up at the corners like the edges of his mouth.

“Okay, lads, tone it down,” Louis rolls his eyes.

“I have to say there is a grain of truth to what he’s said,” Corden presses on anyway. “You _do_ look tired, Louis.”

“I’m busy,” Louis says, a tad sharper than he means to be. “I’m working. Of course I’m tired.”

Ben shakes his head. “I thought you boys were taking a break to rest, not die of exhaustion.”

A waitress steps up to the table with a professional smile firmly fixed to her face. It reminds Louis, suddenly, of Harry, and he cringes away from the thought like he has something to feel guilty for. “How are you doing tonight, gentlemen?”

“Good, thanks,” Ben answers for them, just as expected. “You?”

“Great,” she smiles. “Here’s your menus. Would you like another round, or…?”

James cuts in, “Another round for us, yes, and a beer for our friend.”

“Water’s fine,” Louis tells the waitress. Suddenly he feels less like another bloke out to meet his friends for drinks and dinner and more like a sulky teenager about to be read the riot act by his two dads. Which is ironic, considering Louis’s childhood dad situation.

James waits for the waitress to disappear behind the swinging kitchen doors to continue, “Seriously, Louis. I’m saying this as someone who loves and worries about you. Truly,” James laughs. “I’ll be lying in bed to go to sleep at night agonizing over your health and well-being. It’s not doing my marriage any favors.”

And Louis, in spite of himself, feels a little touched.

“Have you thought about taking a vacation?” Ben asks.

“Actually, I have,” Louis says. “I’m taking my kid on holiday in a bit – before he starts pre-k. I’m just trying to get all this work done before I go, you know – that’s all it is, see.” The waitress returns with their drinks and a basket of rolls that Louis’s grabbing and shoving into his mouth before she even sets a little plate down in front of him. The bread melts like butter in his mouth.

James and Ben exchange a look. “That’s good, then,” Ben finally says. It doesn’t quite sound like he means it.

“Come round mine for tea before you go,” James says. “My kids will teach yours all the worst habits.”

“Where are you taking him?” Ben asks, then. He raises his glass to take a sip, his eyebrows inching up toward his hairline.

“I…” Louis starts, and draws up short. He tries to play it off, “I figure we’ll just show up to the airport and take the first flight out, it’ll be an adventure.” Briana would never stand for it. She’ll probably be expecting an itinerary soon, knowing her. Oh, God.

Later, at home, Louis sits down with his laptop in his bedroom and pulls up Southwest’s homepage, then panics and Googles “best places to take kids,” which only sounds creepy now that he’s already done it. Panic sets in like a fever, and Louis whips out his phone to call – someone. His mum, probably. Someone who will know a good place to take a kid.

He taps on the phone app and his recent calls come up, Niall at the top of the list, and what the hell, Niall’s always been reasonable and known all sorts of shit you wouldn’t expect him to, right, like hell, where _is_ Louis going to take Freddie?

“Hello?” Niall answers.

“Where’d you want to go when you were four?” Louis asks tersely. “For holiday, I mean.”

Niall hums. “Probably Dublin, yeah? Or, I dunno, Galway.”

“Galway,” Louis repeats. As dryly as he can, he says, “Thanks, Neil, very helpful.”

Niall just laughs. “What are you asking for, anyway?”

Louis sits back against his headboard and stretches his legs out from under him. He ought to take up yoga or something. He also ought to quit smoking, eat healthier, and start exercising, but he doesn’t do any of that either, so. He scrubs his face with his palm a few times. “I’m taking my kid on holiday in a few weeks, and I don’t know where to take him.”

Niall hums again, a little longer this time. It’s a neat trick, really – he’s been humming in his songs for so long now that Louis feels soothed by it, though it’s just Niall thinking.

Louis scrubs his itching eyes again and shakes himself out of it. “Sorry, sorry – I mean, how are you?”

“Good,” Niall says, sounding amused. Generous as he is, he goes on, “Just sitting on the tour bus. It’s, um…I don’t know, arse o’clock wherever we are,” he laughs. “I’m watching Breaking Bad.”

“That show aired ten years ago, Nialler,” Louis can’t help but point out.

“Been busy,” Niall murmurs, and yawns.

Silence falls between them, soft as a blanket of snow. “I know,” Louis finally says. He tries to picture Niall tucked up on a shitty tour bus couch in a tattered pair of trackies with a throw over his lap, and can only barely manage it. It’s been a long, long time. “What’d you call me for, earlier?” he finally remembers to ask. “I had a reminder set to call you back, you know, and then Cordo and Ben were all over me – er,” he stops, unwilling to tell Niall that they were worried about him. “All over me about, er, setting me up with one of their producers.”

Niall coos. “They love you, mate.” Louis just rolls his eyes. He can see himself smiling in the dark computer screen. “And I just wanted to say hi, really, you know. You’re terrible about emailing me back.”

“We’re all terrible about emailing back,” Louis says, then stops. It’s a little too true. “Was weird seeing them, anyway,” he volunteers, put at ease by the familiarity of Niall’s quiet, the guitar strumming he probably thinks Louis can’t hear. “Remember when we first came out to LA, for that first album, and we were just like…” He makes a face Niall can’t see.

“Sure I do,” Niall says.

Louis laughs. It hits him all at once, how old and tired he feels, rusty and rusted. Used, and used up. “‘Course you do.”

“Why not take him somewhere you’ve never been?” Niall asks. It takes Louis a moment to remember they’re talking about his holiday.

“Where haven’t we been?” Louis asks.

He can just about see Niall shrug. Then, the answer Louis knew he had, “East Asia, Antarctica, um, Iceland.”

“Antarctica,” Louis repeats. “Seriously?”

Niall laughs again. “Alright, well, it’s no Disneyworld.”

Louis fingers his keyboard thoughtfully. Hmm. He taps the letters into the keyboard. “I mean, it’s sort of beautiful,” he admits.

"I wasn’t really all that serious about Antarctica, Lou.”

“No, Disney, you idiot. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, yeah. There’s roller coasters and everything. And a carousel. Kids love theme parks, right?”

Agreeably, Niall says, “Sure,” and strums another chord on his guitar.

It’s no Galway, but maybe Louis can take the little lad somewhere he’d only dreamt his dad would do, and they can ride the rides till they get sick, and eat carnival food to get sick with. It feels an easy decision, really. Louis clicks around, forwards the info to his personal assistant, and sits back in relief. “My father wouldn’t have done it, would he?” Louis blurts.

Niall plays a sweet little melody. “Hm?”

“Take me to Disney, Niall, keep up.”

“Louis,” Niall says, with infinite patience. “You know I can’t actually read your mind, right?”

Louis just clucks his tongue. “Niall,” he starts.

“Nah,” Niall says. “Your father’d not have done anything you do, Louis.”

“Good lad,” Louis says. He breathes a sigh that takes the last wind out of him, snaps his laptop shut, and pushes it away. “Where exactly are you, anyway?” he asks Niall. Niall used to be so goddamn particular about keeping track of places they’d been; Louis knows he must know now, too. He kicks the blankets down the bed till he can pull them up over himself.

“Somewhere between Helsinki and Vienna,” Niall answers. “Not exactly sure where.”

“Makes you feel like a kid again, eh?” Louis asks. He relaxes against his pillows, the phone resting next to his head. He turns onto his side and lets his eyes slip shut. “Being driven around, no idea where you are.”

He imagines Niall nodding, his voice a familiar backing track. “Just going,” Niall summarizes, and Louis hums his assent, and that’s the last thing he remembers before he falls asleep.

 

***

 

Lottie arrives back in LA in a cloud of sweet-smelling perfume, her lip gloss sticking to Louis’s cheek when she leans against the center console to smack a kiss to her brother. Louis whines and wipes it off with the back of his hand, and then he takes her hand, and she smiles and lets him.

“How was your flight?” Louis asks. He hardly glances over his shoulder before he pulls into traffic, the one benefit of driving this absolutely wretched Range Rover all around town. He’s had the windows tinted after the last time he got papped leaving a club with a girl and the media followed her around for two weeks to find out if she was pregnant. It makes for a pretty intimidating ride, even though Louis’s backseat is littered with teething rings, a couple of tatty-edged kids’ books, and a car seat.

Lottie’s words get lost into the abyss that is her purse. She rummages about in there for – Louis checks the clock – close to five minutes before she pulls out, victorious, a crumpled paper package of chewing gum. She unwraps a stick, wads up the wrapper, and drops it into her purse. Then she offers Louis a stick. “No, thanks,” he says, and watches as she shrugs and pops her gum into her mouth. “It was good,” she finally says. “A bit long, you know how it is. Though I suppose you might’ve forgotten; it’s been a while since you’ve taken it.”

Louis checks the clock. Less than ten minutes, and she’s on his case. It’s not even a new record. “I’m really busy here, Lots.”  

Lottie just hums, unconvinced. He doesn’t want to explain to her that home reminds him too much of Mum, not that she needs to be told. Instead, he says, “I missed you.”

And she relents. She’s too good not to, really. “I missed you, too,” she says.

Louis smiles at her, and she slips her hand into his. They twine their fingers together. “Anywhere you want to stop?” he asks, feeling generous.

“In-n-Out,” Lottie answers promptly. “And then Rodeo Drive.”

“You’re terrible,” Louis says. He’s terribly fond.

They sit down to eat at In-N-Out. The plastic booth sticks to the backs of Louis’s legs and the table sticks to his arms, but it’s air-conditioned, and it lets him sit across from his sister and look at her face. She looks so much like their mum that it hurts. She looks so grown up, like such a lady, that Louis feels like the keeper of one of her secrets: the dirty-faced kid she used to be, her knees scraped and a doll forever tucked under her arm.

“So,” Louis starts, lifting the top off his burger. He starts squeezing more animal sauce onto the bun. “Tell me everything. How are the twins, and Fizzy?”

And she does in her rambling, often cuttingly funny way. Louis thinks (as he often does) that Lottie’s the better of the two of them; wittier, kinder, better at keeping her mouth shut, unnerving in her ability to bend, not to break.

Louis chases the last of his ketchup around the paper-lined plastic tray with his last stone-cold French fry. Lottie’s been talking about taking Phoebe and Daisy to London for a show for their birthday “- and Niall was like, er, I don’t remember what he said, but he was wearing this plaid vest, honestly, a plaid puffy vest in March in London, and – what?” Lottie asks.

Louis’s head shot up so fast at mention of Niall’s name that he’s got a proper crick in his neck. He starts trying to rub it away and scowl and huff and laugh all at the same time, which only serves to make him look like he’s having a conniption, or possibly a stroke. Louis can see his reflection in the polished silver napkin dispenser on the table, and it isn’t a pretty sight. “Nothing, Christ,” Louis says. “You didn’t tell me that you saw Neil.” Privately, he thinks, Niall didn’t tell him that he saw Lottie, either.

But why should he? Lottie was with the band for most of the last tour, she and Niall spent plenty of time together playing table tennis – who didn’t Niall rope into playing a game of ping pong with him? – and carousing about, even hitting up a few clubs. Louis clears his throat. “Is – is that on, then?”

“What?” Lottie asks, sounding perplexed and, as usual, a little cross.

Louis muffles a slight cough into his fist. “You and Niall, I mean.”

“What!” Lottie repeats, this time in a hoot of dismay. “Me and Niall?” She starts laughing, loudly enough that the people at the till look over at them. Louis gives them a sheepish wave, something definitely not like relief settling in his gut. It’s not like he couldn’t have been happy for them, or whatever, it’s just – a surge of possessiveness washes over him, clouding his sight in tunnel vision – it’s just those boys are _his._ On a good day, Louis vacillates between wanting to shine every spotlight and stage light in the world at them, and with wrapping them up in the folds of his coat and tucking them away to safety.

It’s a little embarrassing, really; maybe it’s a dad thing. For the first time in a long time, Louis thinks about asking Liam about it.

Nobody’d really want to be tucked under his coat, anyway. All their dreams came true. Are coming true. Whatever.

“It’s not like you couldn’t have,” Louis says, although one of his best mates dating his little sister, especially Niall, for some reason, has his guts twisting into knots.

“I know better,” Lottie says, talking around the straw in her mouth, “than to do that, Louis.”

Louis doesn’t ask her just what she means. He doesn’t reckon he’ll quite get it, to be honest.

They go shopping on Rodeo Drive, of course, because Louis only pretends to ever get tired of his sisters. Well, mostly. Lottie’s on her fourth boutique within walking distance of the garage where they ditched Louis’s completely conspicuous Rover, and he’s exhausted all of his usual time-killing stuff by responding to all the messages in his Instagram and Twitter inboxes and even organizing the photos on his camera roll into neat folders labeled “Freddie,” “the lads !” and “L A.”

He sighs and slouches down into the sofa, the back of his t-shirt riding up his spine so that his bare skin brushes the soft leather of the couch. Another bloke on the other side of the shop is sat in the matching armchair. He offers Louis a sympathetic grimace when Louis catches his eye, so Louis grins back on instinct. He wonders, idly, how much of a shit head popstar thing it is to call a car to take him back to the Rover so they don’t have to walk.

It’s all the reason Louis needs to dig his phone out of his pocket and tap on Niall’s name. The phone starts ringing, naturally, so Louis slides out of his seat and ambles over to the nearest rack of clothes. He’s got a miserable eye for fashion but he likes the silky soft things that dresses are made out of, sometimes as soft as kitten’s fur. He’d love a shirt like that.

“‘Lo?”

“No, it’s Louis,” Louis says crisply, and waits for Niall to laugh.

Niall clucks his tongue and then, predictably, chuckles. “Well, bugger me, I’d never have guessed.”

“Asshole,” Louis says fondly. “You didn’t tell me you saw Lottie while you were on tour.”

“Jealous?” Niall asks liltingly.

Something hot and aching splashes up the walls of Louis’s chest, and he says, “Of you, of course,” which somehow doesn’t sound the way he meant it to.

“She tried to have me wear lipstick,” Niall offers.

Louis drags his fingertips over a rack of champagne-colored garments as light and sheer as a wedding veil, and much more expensive. He thinks of finding Danielle’s lipstick smeared across his cheek or the hinge of his jaw in the mirror in his living room late in the day, the lipstick dry and flaking it’d been on so long without him realizing, like a present hidden under the Christmas tree skirt. He touches his cheek absently. “That’d be a fine look, young Niall,” Louis says, only half-joking.

Niall laughs, too. “Maybe for the next tour,” he says. Louis listens to him breathe in companionable silence for a moment drawn out to its length like a rubber band fit to snap. Louis feels like he’s fallen into step with Niall again, the nebulous space around them worn and familiar.

They’ve been chatting pretty regular for the last few weeks, but it’s not – Louis feels like he’s stood on the edge of a precipice, sometimes, is all, these lighthearted talks with Niall always almost tipping over into the terribly vulnerable way they used to be but not quite. Louis doesn’t want to pretend he’s got Niall back when he hasn’t, is all.

He breaks the silence before the rubber band snaps and the moment dissolves into awkwardness, or worse, Louis saying something he shouldn’t. He’s never quite sure what it’ll be, but – it’s what he does. “My PA confirmed the tickets to Disney for me and the lad, so – thanks, for that, you know.”

“Oh?” Niall sounds so pleased. “Good, you’ll have to send me a souvenir.”

“Where to, ‘The Tour Bus with A Million Irish People On Traveling All Over Europe’?” Louis asks. He doesn’t try to hide the note of pride in his voice.

Placidly, Niall answers, “No, you pillock, I’m off tour tomorrow for a while. You can send it to ‘Your Irish Mate,’ or ‘The Member of One Direction Who is Better at Footie Than You.’”

Louis huffs and gathers himself for a withering reply. He’s thinking of Niall on that football field for Soccer Aid, though, and how much fun it was, and how they ought to have a rematch sometime soon. Something in him has him saying, “Come along with us, then,” sooner than he can think of it.

“What’s that?” Niall asks.

“To Disney,” Louis explains impatiently. “It’s such shit to come off tour and have nothing to do, I remember – you can’t lie.” He drifts into the changing room area, which is really just a part of the shop like a wide hallway with heavy velvet drapes curtaining two sets of facing stalls from one another. The floor in this part of the shop is that sparkling black stone that looks like gold flecks in black marble and, given where they are, it might actually be. A huge black leather couch takes up the space in the middle of the room. It’d have been a nice place for a kip earlier if Louis’d spotted it. Louis pitches his voice lower for reasons he can’t explain. “It’d be a right laugh,” he goes on imploringly.

Abruptly he feels self-conscious, too pushy by half, and tacks on a hasty, “Though to be fair, it’s not very rock star,” and a laugh that comes out sharper than he means.

Niall’s quiet for a long, long moment. Long enough that Louis starts tugging anxiously at his collar and the hem of his threadbare Stone Roses t-shirt just for something to do. He can’t bring himself to break the silence. He doesn’t quite know where to start. “It’s your baby,” Niall finally says, on something like a sigh. “I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“You wouldn’t be,” is Louis’s immediate, easy answer. He knows it’s part foolishness – he hasn’t proper hung out with Niall in ages, years, actually – but he can’t shake the feeling that Niall would fit right in, as he always has. He can hear Niall’s skepticism on the line and he says, “You’re a part of me, Nialler, c’mon lad,” like shooting himself in the heart.

Niall lets out a gusty sigh. “Well, alright then,” he says. “S’pose I can tag along.”

Louis’s left clutching his phone to his chest in the middle of a dark and frankly intimidating dressing room. He feels half victorious, half like he’s just signed his own death warrant.

Lottie finds him coming out of the dressing rooms. She smiles delightedly, her eyes raking over him. “Were you trying stuff on?” she asks. “Honestly, some of this stuff would look great on you, not that I’m not a fan of the whole…t-shirt/hoodie combo, big brother. Really,” she adds unconvincingly.

“No,” Louis says, stupidly blowing his own cover. What does he need a cover for, though, exactly? Louis shifts his weight. “I mean, I did, but it didn’t fit right.”

Lottie purses her lips. “It’s probably because you’re so skinny,” she says, with a rueful sigh. “Remember when you had a cute butt?”

“I’m not having this conversation,” Louis says, and marches past his sister to the checkout counter to have her purchases rung up with his head held high. He studiously pretends not to know that she’s looking at his rear the whole time. Sisters. Plain madness, it is.

 

***

 

Freddie handles the flight from LA to Florida like a little professional. Louis had picked him up from his mum’s on the way to the airport that morning and found him sitting on the curb with his little suitcase parked beside him, a snapback pulled low to keep the early golden light out of his eyes. He just about leapt into Louis’s car before it’d even stopped moving.

“You’ll be attentive, and thoughtful, and selfless,” Briana had said, her eyes boring into Louis’s like a snake charmer working its magic on a particularly deadly cobra. “You’ll keep to the schedule you sent me or I’ll send out a search party, and I’ll talk to the baby every night.”

“Bri,” Louis said, with far more patience than he quite knew he had, “I know. Everything will be alright. And he’s not a baby anymore,” Louis tacked on. Even he’s not sure why he did it. It only annoys Bria.

“He better be,” Briana said, and leaned in to press a kiss to Louis’s bristly cheek. Then she’d gone round and spoken to their son through the open window about being very careful and not to go off with strangers and most of all, to have a good time. Louis watched her in the rearview mirror and the way Freddie nodded along to her, his little feet kicking against the booster seat he was buckled into, and thought about his own mum. There wasn’t a day that went by when he was a little lad that he didn’t think the sun rose and set on her. Sometimes Louis begrudges Briana the way Freddie looks at her, and then it passes, and he’s just grateful.

“When you get back,” Bria added, just before Louis rolled the windows up and pulled away, “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Louis says, “We can talk now,” though they can’t, really. “‘S not like we’re doing anything.”

And that, at least, makes her roll her eyes and smile. A little warmth spreads within Louis’s chest, proud that he can make her laugh, still, at least. “When you get back,” she just says.

Louis trusts her. “Alright,” he says. She waves them off from the end of the driveway till Louis turns a corner and they lose sight of each other.

“Do you want anything, buddy?” Louis asks Freddie, who’s halfway through the Lego movie and the bag of snacks his mum packed for him. The flight attendant flashes Louis a well-practiced smile, her lipstick smudged at the corner of her mouth, something tired in the red rims of her eyes. Louis’s well familiar with that look.

These days it’s a toss-up if someone recognizes him. Louis doesn’t mind so much – it’s almost a novelty now, like it was in the very beginning – but he’s set against someone snapping a pic of him and the little lad. There’s no flash of recognition in her face, and Louis tamps down the brief flash of disappointment.

“Coke?” Freddie asks.

It’s the way his voice lilts up into a question that has Louis raising his eyebrow. “Your mum lets you have soda before lunch now?”

Freddie smiles and tucks his shoulders up around his ears.

“We’ll have water, please,” Louis tells the flight attendant, who nods graciously and moves away.

In a way, it was easier when Freddie was a wee little baby. He drooled all over the place and pooped his pants at least once a day and seemed to eat nonstop, but he was such a wee thing, and Louis never had to worry that he’d say the wrong thing, or do something wrong. Now that Freddie’s older Louis can’t help but think that he’ll catch on soon.

All his childish wonder and belief in magic and fairy tales and that a bird will snatch him up off the lawn like Louis says if he doesn’t come in and get ready for dinner soon will wither away. And in its place will be his parents’ fractured relationship and Louis’s particular shortcomings, his failings, all the ways he doesn’t measure up, and Louis – Louis’s dead afraid he can’t fix it. He’s been spackling over the cracks in the walls and these days it feels like the whole rotten house is falling down around him.

Little fingers jab Louis in the shoulder. “Want some?” Freddie asks, probably not for the first time – he’s got that cross look on, the one that’s so endearing on his young face. He offers Louis the bag of homemade trail mix.

Louis blinks, coming back to himself, and manages a smile at the little lad. “Sure, buddy. What’ve we got?”

“Hmm,” Freddie hums. “Pretzels, Cheez-Its, M&Ms, Cheerios, and raisins.”

“There’s still M&Ms left?” Louis asks. “You didn’t pick them out first thing?”

“I thought I did!” Freddie giggles, and shoves his hand into the bag to dig around for the last of the chocolates. Louis’s smile feels a lot more natural, and he combs a hand through the boy’s hair, ends up with Freddie’s head tucked up against his chest while they share the tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of Louis.

It’s one of the quickest cross-country flights Louis’s ever been on.

 

***

 

Florida’s a godforsaken swamp. Mosquitoes buzz around Louis’s head like buzzards circling over roadkill no matter how much bug spray Louis drenches himself in, he’s got a chronic case of swamp ass, and the tip of his nose is sunburnt an angry red that will, Louis can only imagine, peel all the way down to bone and leave him with a smarting case of cancer.

And he’s having a great time. Freddie’s not old enough yet for the big rides like the roller coasters or the ones that go way up and then plummet nearly to the Earth like a meteor crash, which was a little disappointing when Louis first realized it, but it’s alright. Louis’s spent the better part of the last three days going round and round in circles on rides that spin them till one of the Tomlinson boys is ready to puke, and then they stagger off to buy more theme park junk food.

Louis’s even a little glad that some of the rides are chill enough, like the lazy train that drives them round in a big loop, because he can keep one eye on his kid and reorganize his backpack with the other. They’ve gone through two cans of sunscreen already ‘cos the moment Louis saw Fred pinking up under the son he’d panicked and soaked him in the stuff till he was dripping with it like butter off corn on the cob. Anyway, it’s a bit nice, is all. Having fun, and riding rides, and not totally fucking up his dad duties.

So far, they’ve tackled Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and now Epcot. Louis remembers thinking, once, that if he ever had the chance to come to Disney World he’d probably never leave, but now that he’s got a kid who fatigues out after a couple of hours of standing in line or walking across the miles and miles of theme park tucked away into the Florida bog, he’s honestly happy to take the trolley back to their hotel at the end of the day. Forty pounds doesn’t sound like much till it startles from a brief nap in your arms to alert you of its need to go potty.

Being at Disney in all the theme parks reminds Louis a bit of the way being on tour used to make the rest of the world drop away. What was that word Harry and Liam used to use? A bubble. Yeah, it’s like a bubble. Like, the rest of the world was still out there, war and poverty and Louis’s family whom he loved and missed, but nothing that happened outside really affected them inside the bubble.

It’d been strange as hell coming out of that bubble and realizing how vulnerable Louis was, in spite of all the money and fame. He hadn’t known he was still acting like a kid till his family went away and made him grow up.

“So are you having fun?” Louis overhears Briana ask Freddie that night. Freddie’s splayed out on the bed next to Louis’s, Freddie’s smart watch with the GPS tracker on speaker somewhere on Freddie’s bed.

“Yeah, Momma,” Freddie says. He rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and Louis quietly slides off his bed and pads into their suite’s living room. Freddie’s maybe a bit too young to give a shit about privacy but there are some things, Louis thinks, he’s just not meant to be privy too. Anyway, listening to them just makes Lou want to call his own mum.

Instead, Louis calls Niall. “You’re eating your vegetables?” Briana asks next, while Louis’s phone rings and rings. He’s just about given up when Niall picks up, sounding harried. “Yeah?”

“Oi, bad timing?” Louis asks.

“No, of course not,” Niall says quickly. Then, “Yeah, sort of.”

Louis stretches his legs out and props his crossed heels up on the coffee table. He’s itching for a smoke but he’ll wait to step outside till the lad’s asleep, just to be safe. He settles for scratching at the mosquito bites on his bare legs instead. “What’s on, then?” He doesn’t ask, “Are you still coming?” because frankly that sounds a little desperate, and it’s not as frightening as he thought it’d be, this holiday with his son. Not that Freddie’s frightening, but – well, anyway. You know.

“The label’s servers got hacked,” Niall says in a rush. “It happens, they’re saying, but all my new music, all my demos are on those servers – I made everyone I sent them to before delete them, so they wouldn’t leak, and now they might be gone forever ‘cept what I’ve got of my notes and my journal, and –”

“Slow down, lad,” Louis murmurs, as calmly as he can. Niall’s voice has gone breathless, like it does when the room starts closing in on him.

Niall takes a deep breath. “I’ve got to stay here and try to put the songs back together before I forget them.”

Louis manfully restrains himself from saying, “So you’re not coming?” He’s not so far up his own arse that he can’t tell that’s not the main priority, though he sort of wishes it was, in a backwards way. Something about being in a bubble, about Freddie being here, so close and for so long that Louis’s started thinking of him as a permanent attachment, like he won’t have to let him go back to his mum at the end, Louis wants to share with Niall.

Instead, he says, “You’ve got the best memory of anyone I know, mate. I’m sure you’ve got it.”

“Yeah, well…” Niall sighs. There’s some shuffling about on his end, like he’s moved his phone from one ear to the other, and then, “Shit, I’m – I’m meant to meet you, Louis, I –”

“It’s alright,” Louis says smoothly. He doesn’t want Niall to apologize to him for reasons that are too complicated to explain to himself. “Do what you have to do.”

“You should come up to London after,” Niall says. For a brief moment, Louis imagines having the luxury of taking Freddie to visit his grandma and aunts and uncle abroad, and showing him round the place – if there can be any – where Louis grew up. “Lads’ holiday,” says Niall.

“Not sure I’m much of a lad anymore,” Louis tells him. His voice comes out sharper than he means to, not at all the way he means it to. He can’t swallow down his disappointment fast enough, like trying to hold back vom when you’ve got food poisoning. “Not all of us are rock stars, you know.”

“I know,” Niall says. There’s an edge to his voice, a whipcord drawn taut and tense, and Louis falls silent. He feels like he and Niall are on the brink of an argument and he doesn’t even know why, exactly. He hesitates before breaking the terse silence between them, morbidly curious as to what Niall’s going to say. “I know that, Louis. I wasn’t saying –” He cuts himself off with a sound of frustration. “I don’t need you to tell me how shit this is.”

Louis drags his fingers through the ring of condensation left by his Coke Zero on the table next to him. He baited Niall – this is his fault. “Next time, right?” Louis finally says. He says it like a peace offering.

Niall’s voice is careworn when he says, relieved, “Yeah, Lou.”

They ring off a moment later, after a stilted attempt at a normal conversation, and Louis drops his phone into his lap with a feeling of bitter satisfaction. He’d known better than to try too hard to bring back his friendship with Niall like it’s 2012 again and they share a hive mind. Niall’s unavailable, and Louis’s life is cluttered and messy, and now instead of just drifting apart as they should have done they’ve made a go of it and failed. Given a choice between burning out in a fierce and brief flash and letting the candle flame flicker till there’s no wax left to melt, in this case, Louis would pick the slow burn.

Freddie ambles out of the bedroom. The collar of his t-shirt droops down his skinny chest. Louis’s heart gives a familiar lurch of fondness. “Can we watch a movie?” he asks.

Louis pats the spot next to him on the couch. He shoves his phone deep between two sofa cushions and tucks Freddie up close to his chest. They settle on something kid-friendly and entirely ridiculous. Louis combs Freddie’s soft hair with his fingers and steadfastly doesn’t think of anything at all.

Freddie knocks out halfway through the movie. Louis sits there till the end, though, and then he shuts the TV off and gathers Freddie up in his arms and puts him to bed. He props open the door to the tiny balcony and chainsmokes his way through three cigarettes, and then he picks the butts off the floor and tosses them in the bin.

By the time Louis lays down for bed at night, it’s like he’d never expected Niall to show up at all.

 

***

 

The only real misfire of Louis’s lad-and-dad holiday is that he lets Freddie eat too much carnival food (a hotdog, a corn dog, some funnel cake, cotton candy, and an ICEE) and the babe pukes all over the place on Tomorrowland’s Carousel of Progress. Louis takes him to the men’s loo and pats him down with wet paper towels and feeds him water till he asks Louis, hopefully, if they can go again.

“He seems like he had a good time,” Bria observes, when they’re back in LA. Louis’s sat up at the breakfast bar feeling sweaty and sunburnt even though he really had done a good job remembering sunscreen, if he does say so himself.

The electric kitchen lights feel strangely inauthentic and too bright after days spent under the hot sun. Louis fidgets with the label on his beer bottle, and then he runs a hand through his hair. He can hear Freddie in his room with Austin telling him all about the rides they rode and movie they watched on the plane. His heart stings, just a bit.

“I reckon so,” Louis agrees. Louis’s got a photo of the two of them on either side of someone dressed as Mickey Mouse, and the way he and Freddie are smiling, their faces all creased up, has already taken up permanent residence in his wallet. He’s only sad that it’s over. “I really appreciate you letting me have him for the week. It was – I loved it.”

Briana puts her hand over Louis’s. “He’s your son, too,” she says. “Always will be.”

Louis wrestles down the part of him that wants to snap, “Then why do you have him more days out of the year than I do?” or “Then why aren’t I still good enough, still?” and says, instead, “Reckon so, with that face.”

Briana wrinkles her nose, a smile spreading across her face. “He is a miniature version of you,” she says.

And that’s really what’s at the heart of everything between them. Briana and Louis both love fiercely something that’s equally a part of the other person. Remembering that, Louis feels a lot less sulky about having to pass Freddie back off to her for the rest of the week.

“About before,” Briana starts, her voice lower, now, though there’s no one to overhear them but Briana’s mum watching the cooking channel on the couch. “When I said I wanted to talk to you.”

“Yeah?” Louis asks, dread pulling his stomach down to the soles of his feet. He’s got no reason to think it’s bad news except that Briana looks so serious, and he knows he’s going to worry. His duffle bag is still in the boot of his car, and he’s got unpacking and washing and loads of prep to do when he gets home to catch up with his acts while he’s been gone. Louis’s trying not to dread it. Louis nods. “Go on,” he says, though he’d just as soon go pass out in the back seat.

“I met someone,” Briana admits in a rush. “We’ve been seeing each other pretty steadily for a couple of months now, and I think it’s time he met Freddie.”

Louis hears nothing but ringing silence for a moment. Then, “So – so you sent me and Freddie on that holiday for a week to, what, butter me up? To get us out of your hair so you could f-er, _canoodle_ , as much as you wanted? What the hell, Bri?”

Briana’s face has gone stone-cold, and hard. “Don’t even start with me on that, Louis,” she says.

Louis plays back his own words to himself. It’s not that he didn’t mean them – as a rule, Louis means everything he says – but even he can’t help but wince. “I don’t suppose I’ve really got a say,” he says. “I mean, you’ve got him most of the time, half the time when you’ve got him he doesn’t even call – so, really, why even bother asking me? Just do whatever you’re going to do, for fuck’s sake. I really don’t want to hear about it.”

Briana’s fallen silent, her face pale and pinched against what Louis would bet is an onslaught of a reply. “Good night, Louis,” is all she says. Louis opens his mouth to argue, and then he shakes his head, and takes his cue to go.

He stops by Freddie’s room to say good night, his heart still pounding. Freddie’s sat on the floor amidst a small sea of Lego pieces.

“Careful stepping over that,” Louis says. He bends down to accept Freddie’s hug around his knees. He swallows, hard. When he speaks, his voice comes out terribly soft. “I’ll pick you up Saturday, we’ll have some adventures this weekend, alright? I love you buddy.”

“Love you too, Dad,” says Freddie, his voice muffled against Louis’s jeans. Louis hugs him back as long as he can.

 

***

 

The first half of the week passes without word from Briana. Louis rings Freddie Tuesday night to ask him if he’s nervous about starting pre-k the next day.

“I reckon a bit,” Freddie says. “I hope they don’t make me take a nap.”

“Naps are good for you,” Louis says. “If you don’t nap, when are us grown-ups supposed to plot evil things like making you share your toys and eat your vegetables?” Freddie laughs.

Wednesday morning, Louis and Briana manage to meet up to bring Freddie to his classroom and have a look around and meet his teacher, Ms. Lindsay, a smiling woman with graying hair. Even the glint of recognition in her eyes doesn’t offset Louis’s foul mood, though he hides it as best he can.

“Have a good day, Freddie. I’ll be back this afternoon to pick you up,” Briana tells Freddie, who doesn’t seem to hear her, he’s so engrossed in the arts and crafts project Ms. Lindsay has set up.

Louis opens his mouth outside, in the car park, to say something to Briana – he’s not quite decided what – when she cuts him off with an icy, “I’ll see you Saturday when you pick up Freddie,” and strides to her car. Louis lets her go. It’s probably for the best he doesn’t open his big mouth right now anyway.

He spends most of the day in his office trying to twirl his pen around his fingers and failing abysmally. His secretary brings him lunch in a takeaway box, and Louis gets halfway through the chicken strips before he pushes the box away from him on his desk, his stomach curdling hard.

Now the box is just sat there, full of food he won’t eat, that’s probably not safe to eat anyway, and Louis’s hungry. It’s always like this, though – he starts to feel stretched too thin in his life, and it’s like his stomach takes on that mentality, too, till he gets to feeling sick all the damn time. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.

Louis finally packs it in around four-thirty, figuring he won’t get home till somewhere round six anyway with traffic. He collects his things, shoves them into his messenger bag all higgledy-piggledy, and slouches out of the office. Nobody stops him.

The drive home is long, and Louis spends most of it not thinking about anything in particular. It’s some shit Harry would do, and probably has done, which only prickles Louis if he thinks about it, which _not_ doing is the whole point of this exercise. Mindlessness, or mindful thoughtlessness, or some shit like that. Harry would know, not that Louis would ask.

Louis punches his security code into the gate and drives through, leaving his car in the front of the house so he won’t have to drag it out of the garage when he’s running late tomorrow morning. He’s just grabbed a bag of crisps out of the pantry and sat himself down in front of the telly for an X-Files marathon when the doorbell goes. Louis groans.

“Jessie,” Louis says, reckoning it’s his PA followed him home to rag on him for not getting more done, “really, you’ve got to learn to call, and also to take a night off once in a while.” He pulls the door open.

Niall’s face wrinkles up in a laugh. “Jessie, eh?” he says. “You’ve got a lady of the evening on call, then, Tommo?”

“Not as yet,” Louis says. “I take it you’re here to apply?” His mouth works faster than he does. Louis blinks, and Niall doesn’t evaporate into thin air. “What are you doing here?”

“We just kept missing each other,” Niall says, inching forward. Louis steps back to let him over the threshold. The entry hall lights turn Niall’s hair a false shade of gold, and Louis’s heart gives a weird sideways lurch. It’s not helped at all by Niall snaking his arms around Louis and bringing him in tight for a hug. “Didn’t seem right,” Niall adds, after Louis’s forgotten what they were even talking about.

“It’s mad to see you,” Louis says. He reaches out and drags his fingers down the side of Niall’s stubbled face before he can think better of it like he’s always giving Freddie little loving touches, and then he doesn’t know what to do but laugh at himself. “You and your patchy beard,” he adds, finally.

Niall laughs and strokes his own chin. “Shut up,” he says cheerfully. “Aren’t you going to give me a tour?”

They get as far as the back garden – straight through the living room and kitchen – before they lose the plot. Louis kicks one of Freddie’s little play footie balls into the pool and watches it bob along the surface like a fishing lure. He’s aware of Niall watching him from the corner of his eye, same as he’s looking at Niall every time he pretends to look away.

Looking out over Louis’s infinity pool, Niall says, “California,” in his best Terminator accent.

“I hardly ever come out here anymore,” Louis says. He’d had all these plans when he bought the house of playing footie with the lad and floating around on pool loungers and maybe even the occasional water balloon fight, and then he’d just kept saying “tomorrow” till tomorrow’s today, and it’s just him and Niall, silhouetted by the light spilling out of the kitchen windows.

“I’m hardly anywhere anymore,” Niall answers. Louis tenses, preparing for Niall to launch into the usual excited babble about his tour and his gigs and his band and the new songs he’s working on. It’s not that Louis’s not happy for him; he is. Out of some masochistic impulse, Louis looks at him. Niall looks…sad, almost. Wistful. Huh?

Louis blinks, and Niall’s expression smooths out. “Let’s get out of here,” Louis says.

Niall looks at him. “Where to?”

“Does it matter?” Louis asks. Niall just grins.

Louis spares ten minutes on changing into a fresh shirt and gelling his hair up off his head. He comes out of his loo to find Niall slouching on the couch, his feet kicked up on the coffee table. He’s wearing a plain white tee under a butter-soft leather jacket. Louis sort of wants to touch.

Niall drives Louis’s black Range Rover into downtown LA. The Nice Guy is the easiest place to get into at a moment’s notice, they get paid so handsomely by the paps always loitering outside, so that’s where they go. Louis texts his LA mates to meet them and half a dozen answer the summons, loyal knights they are.

It’s a place Louis’s been to a dozen, two dozen, times before, but it doesn’t seem familiar tonight. The bass thumps so loud Louis can feel it in his bones, and he could swear that he doesn’t exist between moments of bright lights strobing over the crowd, cutting through the taste of tequila heavy on his tongue like a searchlight. And there’s Niall, never too far away, matching him drink for drink.

A beautiful stranger loops her arms around Louis’s neck and pushes her tongue into his mouth. She tastes like brandy, which doesn’t mix well with the margarita salt caught in the cracks in his lips. Louis ignores it.

A hand comes down on his shoulder, firm and strong. “Lou!” Niall laughs. Louis detaches his face from the girl’s, disgruntled and a little annoyed; then he sees Niall’s ruddy face, the collar of his white shirt pulled down by his glasses, and it all dissolves.

“Neil!” Louis shouts. “Meet my new friend.” He reaches blindly for the bird’s hand; she lets him take it.

“Hi, new friend,” Niall parrots obediently.

“Cassie,” supplies the girl. Then, “Wait. Is that – are you Niall Horan?”

Louis can see some of the inebriated looseness drain out of Niall’s face. He’s never seemed disingenuous to Louis, exactly, but there’s a certain amount of – of making an effort, plainly, that Niall puts into meeting fans. That Niall puts into everything, really.

Cassie wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Wow – wow. Can I have a picture?”

“Sure,” Niall says, because of course he does. “C’mon, Lou.”

They stand three in a row while a girl in a UCLA sweatshirt takes their picture on Cassie’s iPhone. Louis’s feeling a little put-out, and a little frustrated, really. Niall gets recognized and Louis doesn’t and that, he tells himself, is the way he wanted it. There was always meant to be an end to – to everything, for him, because it wasn’t maintainable anyway. He should’ve come to terms with that as soon as he knew about Freddie. He’s not sure why the twisting feeling in his gut remains.

“Cheese,” says the UCLA girl. Niall reaches across Cassie’s back in the crowded club and squeezes Louis’s shoulder like he just _knows_ , and even though it’s too much and sort of hideously embarrassing Louis’s grateful for him.

He ends up going home alone. Well, not alone. He’s got Niall up in the driver’s seat at three-thirty in the morning. Louis only has to whinge a little for Niall to stop at In-N-Out for double doubles and chocolate shakes. He makes it as far as his front garden when he gives up and flops down onto the grass. At least if he pukes out here, all he has to do is hose it down.

Niall sits down beside him with drunken care, though he must’ve been sobered up if he offered to drive. The grass is cool and soft beneath Louis’s back, and he makes a mental note to compliment his gardener.

“Sorry for cockblocking you,” Niall says, while Louis’s navigating how to slurp from his smoothie without spilling the whole thing all down his chest.

“Nah,” Louis just says. He props himself up on an elbow. Sweet icy chocolate bursts onto his tongue in a rush, and he groans aloud. “Never you mind, Nialler,” Louis goes on. He feels like he ought to say more. He feels that way a lot, he reckons, only he’s never sure what it is he ought to say. “Got you, don’t I?”

Niall looks down on Louis spilled out onto the grass. He feels rather more pitiful than he’d like right now. “Do you really need to ask?” Niall laughs. He finally leans back next to Louis.

Los Angeles’s smog isn’t good for stargazing, but Louis does his best, peering distrustfully up into the inky black sky. “We’re not going to sleep here, are we?” Niall asks.

Louis blinks slowly against the alcohol in his stomach. He swears he can feel Niall’s warmth next to him, and the satisfaction of it is a heavy weight in his stomach and his eyelids. “Course not,” Louis yawns.

He jerks awake a couple of hours later when the automated sprinkler system kicks on and sprays both him and Niall with water.

“Christ,” mumbles Niall, staggering behind Louis into his house. Louis opens the door to the first guest room that he comes to and Niall doesn’t even stop to kick off his boots; he just does a faceplant onto the bed and starts snoring.

Louis catches his breath leaning against the doorframe. A weird, familial instinct fills Louis with the need to dote on him. Louis stands up straight and tosses his head and scoffs a little for effect, and then he carefully slips Niall’s boots off and fishes his glasses out from under his chest so he doesn’t crack them in his sleep.

Lilac veins spiderweb across Niall’s eyelids, and Louis can see the creases of his laughter lines even with his face lax and soft in sleep. His skin looks a little dry, and his cheeks are flushed a rosy pink. Louis presses a kiss to his bristly cheek without thinking about it, then freezes. Niall gives a soft snore, so Louis shakes his head, mutters a “Night, Niall,” and slips out of his room. He closes the door behind him.

 

***

 

If he goes to sleep, Louis knows he won’t be up for work in the morning even though he’s going to be well helpful anyway, tired and nursing a hangover like the Grim Reaper’s standing on his shoulders. He keeps himself awake tidying up his house. He has boxes of takeaway and old pairs of shorts and pants and socks that never found their way into the laundry bin and his fridge is more than half-rotted. He brews a very, very strong pot of coffee and is just braving the dishes piled high in the sink when Niall stumbles into the kitchen.

“It’s seven o’clock,” Louis says. “Go back to bed.”

“Woke up and thought I missed stage call,” Niall says, rubbing at his face with his sleeve. Louis can see the line of spit dried onto his cheek.

Louis has to make himself look away. “Well, you didn’t. Go back to bed.”

“What are you doing today?” Niall asks instead.

“Work,” Louis says. Niall stays silent, so Louis explains, “Got a couple of recording sessions with a band signed to the label, and then some planning stuff. Boring stuff.”

“Can I come?”

Louis hesitates. It’s not that he _doesn’t_ want Niall to come, exactly. It’s just that the stable, fatherly rut he’s settled into is, well, stable and fatherly. Lame. Louis just can’t get the memory of standing on that stage in the X-Factor out of his head, he and the boys lined up one last time, princes ready to take over the world. There isn’t a measurement for how far Louis feels he’s fallen short of the mark. He can’t say no, though.

“Okay,” he says.

The last of his adrenaline or energy or simple caffeine fades out of Louis’s system halfway through the first recording session. He tweaks a knob on the mixing board and tries as hard as he can not to puke everywhere while the band bangs out what they hope’ll be their first single over, and over, and over again. It’d not be so bad if there was just a little less clashing guitar and drums in it.

Niall doesn’t look as though he feels much better, slouched on the sofa tucked into the corner behind Louis. Louis can see his reflection in the window separating them from the recording booth. His eyes keep slipping sideways to Niall’s pale face and the shadows under his eyes. Louis can see the exhaustion written all over him like scratches in his favorite CD.

He seems taller than he was in the band. Broader, too. His hair’s fully dark now and his patchy beard’s filled in, and at first glance he doesn’t look even remotely like the boy Louis first knew. But if Louis looks closer, he can see every familiar twist of his mouth and eye-crinkling smile caught in the faint lines being worn into Niall’s face. It’s a strange thing to see so much of your life in someone else’s face. Louis thinks Niall wears it well.

Louis goes to sit next to Niall when the band’s finally finished and they’re just waiting for Louis’s other band to arrive. “So,” says Niall, “this is producing, eh?”

Louis sinks further into the couch that’s older than he is. It doesn’t smell very good, for all of that, so he tucks his face into Niall’s shoulder. “Mm,” he hums, muffled into Niall’s shirt. The more hungover he gets, the more the real world creeps back into his thoughts. Briana’s boyfriend and Freddie’s preschool and the homesick sting in Louis’s chest that never really lets up only let him push them away so long before they find their way back in. “Glamorous, isn’t it?”

“Definitely prefer being on the other side,” Niall says. He gets his arm out from under Louis so Louis leans away, but Niall just wraps his arm around Louis’s shoulders and pulls him back in more comfortably. Niall smells like Louis’s washing powder and his own particular woodsy deodorant. It’s good – surprisingly good.

It takes Louis a long moment to figure what Niall’s said. He doesn’t think before he says, “Prefer singing, you do,” ‘cos he’s seen the videos of Niall singing on his own all around the world and he recognizes joy when he sees it.

Niall doesn’t argue. “How long have we got?”

Louis doesn’t even open his eyes. “Twenty minutes.”

“I’ll wake you up,” Niall says, so Louis lets himself crash on Niall’s shoulder.

That night, back at Louis’s place, Niall remarks, “We must be getting old. I feel like I could sleep for a year, probably.”

“That’ll be the jetlag,” Louis says smartly, “or the world tour.”

Niall pokes around Louis’s fridge, humming under his breath. Louis hops up onto the counter. “Oh,” he says, and frowns. “Should I have dropped you off at your place?”

“What for?” Niall asks, turning to frown at Louis.

Louis shrugs. “I dunno. You’re the busy popstar, haven’t you got shit to do?”

“Told you,” Niall says. “I’m here for you.”

“Maye I don’t want you hanging around,” Louis says. He plucks an apple out of the fruit bowl, polishes it with the hem of his shirt, and takes a bite.

Niall doesn’t even consider it. “Piss off,” he just says.

“Seriously,” Louis pushes. He’s not sure why he’s doing it except that Niall can’t say stuff like “I’m here for you” and not seriously plan to hang around. Dropping out of his life and into someone else’s is a classic Harry maneuver, not Niall. “What about your family, and the LIC, and work?”

Niall stops pulling ingredients out of Louis’s fridge. “I’ve just done the tour, I can work as much as I want from here, and Willie and Deo are flying out next week.” He pauses, then asks hesitantly, “Okay?”

As though he even has to ask. Louis swallows and then heaves a dramatic sigh. “Well, I suppose if I must.” Niall smiles slow, sure. Louis bites the inside of his cheek. “What are you making, anyway?”

That soft smile curving his mouth, Niall says, “Chicken salad.” Louis whines about eating healthy more out of habit than anything. “What are you doing this weekend?”

“Picking up the little lad tomorrow,” Louis says. He nods at the calendar tacked onto the pantry door; all of his Freddie days are highlighted with big, glaring red circles. Louis’s not thinking of it till he says it aloud, and then he blurts, “I was thinking of taking him to play some footie in the park, if you want to come.”

And Niall’s turning to him from the counter with a smile, a full plate for each of them in his hands, and he says, “Sure.”

 

***

 

“I think I need a break.” Niall says the words so quietly Louis doesn’t hear them at first. He combs his fingers through Freddie’ soft hair in his lap while Stitch gets hit by a semi on the telly. “From, like, it.”

Louis nods encouragingly. There’s only ever really been one _it_ in their lives. He still feels caught somewhere between sleeping and waking, the room so dark around them, Freddie’s snores so soothing. Maybe that’s why Niall finally started talking.

Niall looks down at his hands while he talks. He traces the seams of Louis’s practical, washable couch with his calloused fingertip, and says slowly, under the babble of children’s TV, “I, like.” His eyes flicker up to Louis. “I feel like I’ve been doing it too long. Like I’ve been on this ride, right, mad times, good stuff. Only now I’m afraid I’m forgetting how to get off.”

The hard telly light washes out half of Niall’s face, and the other half is plunged into shadow. He looks older, Louis realizes. He looks so much older. “I’m here,” Louis says. His voice comes out a whisper. This whole conversation could’ve been a dream, ‘cept that it’s not.

Niall flashes a grin. It’s just a faint ghost of his usual smile, but it feels more private for all that. Like a secret. No, just…intimate. Louis’s heart feels stretched-out. “I know,” he says.

Louis shifts over till he can put his head down on Niall’s shoulder. Niall’s cheek presses against the top of Louis’s head. They stay like that till the credits roll, and Niall gets them all up to bed.

 

***

 

Niall doesn’t come to work with Louis every day, but when he does, Louis makes a special effort to seem engaged and interested in the process. That’s how he figures out that the guitarist for his hopeful girl band doesn’t have the faintest clue how to play.

“Guys love a girl who plays guitar,” she explains when Louis confronts her about it.

“Yeah, but,” Louis has to say, pained, “you can’t play your own instruments if you can’t…play.” And that’d been such a huge selling point for them. Half-desperate, Louis asks, “Can you learn?”

So that’s how Niall comes to be Louis’s guitarist’s guitar teacher. There’s a whole book full of label-affiliated people Louis could’ve called, but Niall was there, and he offered, and Louis can’t say he minds hanging around Niall’s house in the evenings on days he doesn’t have Freddie listening to him carefully pluck guitar strings. Daisy, the would-be guitarist, throws in an interjection when something clicks for her, and sometimes Niall takes the guitar into his lap and they’ll plunge into a bare bones cover.

The girl band starts sounding a lot better, in short. It’s not that Louis’d had his eyes or ears shut before, he thinks, it’s that he was _only_ seeing or listening. Lottie’d know; there’s something invisible and magic to this whole music business, and Louis just forgets sometimes, too caught up in the business of it.

“Do you still write?” Niall asks one night over beers and ping pong. Niall bought a table for his house because he’s a nerd and also the most predictable person in the universe.

Louis sets down his beer in outrage. A little spills over the rim and onto his fingers, and he scowls and wipes his hand on his shirt. “Of course I do!”

“Because I haven’t seen you at it in a while,” Niall goes on placidly.

“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, Neil,” Louis says. “Haven’t you even watched _Small Soldiers_?”

Niall just smiles.

Louis chews on his bottom lip. He casts about for an excuse that doesn’t make him look absolutely rubbish. “Used to writing with Payno, is all,” Louis finally says. He picks up his beer bottle and chews on the rim like a rabbit.

“Oh.”

“You talk to him much?” Louis ventures, as casually as he can.

Niall hesitates, then shakes his head. “Just now and then. He’s busy, though, with the baby, and his career.”

“Not everyone’s as good as you are at keeping in touch,” Louis says. He usually deals compliments in the form of insults but there’s something so deeply satisfying about the pleased flush that spreads over Niall’s skin when Louis commends him that has him doling them out left and right. It’s a bit of a mess, really. “Briana’s got a boyfriend,” Louis says, while Niall drinks a beer and plays ping pong one-handed.

The ping pong ball pings Niall right in the chest, and he doesn’t react. “Well,” says Niall. “Okay. So, how do you feel about that?”

“Dunno,” Louis says. He hasn’t told anyone yet, like it’s some secret of his to keep. It’s not, it’s not even a secret. Louis doesn’t know what he’s doing most of the time. He bites his lip. There’s something dark and terrible under all of that but Louis doesn’t want to trot it out right now, in front of Niall, to himself. “Anyway, where’d the ball go?”

Niall lets it go for a full day and then, while they’re idling in the pharmacy drive thru line for Freddie’s inhaler refill, Niall asks, “So, are you planning to meet him, then, or…?”

“Who?” Louis asks. Then, “Niall!” He chances a look at Freddie in the backseat. He’s looking right back at Louis. “Never mind,” says Louis.

“Briana’s boyfriend,” Niall goes on placidly. “Don’t you think you should meet him?”

“Niall,” Louis grits out. “Please let’s not talk about this in front of you-know-who.”

“I want you to meet him, Dad,” Freddie chimes in. He kicks his heels against his booster seat and slurps on his strawberry banana smoothie.

Louis shoots a death glare at Niall. “Did you enlist my son’s help for this?” The drive thru line inches along.

“Me ‘n’ Niall think you’d like him,” says Freddie.

“I don’t like either of you,” Louis says.

“Yes, you do,” Niall and Fred say. It’s a little creepy. Louis rolls his eyes and smiles and pushes down the urge to reach for a cigarette.

 

***

 

Louis finally makes it to one of Niall’s shows. The Troubadour had an opening, and since Niall hasn’t yet met a wall that he can’t befriend, let alone a person, he took the gig. No announcement, no promo; it’s the sort of thing Louis knows Niall loves. He can play these big shows and be so many things to so many people, and then sometimes, like this, he’s just up there for himself. It’s a bit like the bigger he gets, and the more the myth of him grows, the more he needs to do something real and small.

Louis can understand why he’d forget how to get off the ride. It looks awfully good on him.

A stagehand helps Niall under the strap a pretty red vintage electric. Louis loves a live gig, but he loves rehearsals, too. The venue always looks different with all the lights on. It’s like pulling back the curtain on a really good magic trick and figuring out the way it works. Only, with music, there is no secret. It’s just music.

The Troubadour’s drummer kicks in with a sweet little lick from one of Niall’s songs, and Niall plunges right into the chorus of his lead single, not missing a beat. He strides across the club’s stage, closer to where Louis’s sat at a little round table nursing a Bloody Mary and the snarled, confusing feeling in his chest.

“Come up here with me, Lou,” Niall calls on a laugh.

Louis just raises his drink in a toast. The tight squeeze in his chest loosens up, and Louis’s relieved to be so happy for him. “I think you’ve got it worked out,” he says. He hopes Niall hears it for what it is. _I’m proud of you._

Going by Niall’s smile, he gets it.

 

***

 

Freddie hangs from his mum’s hand when Louis drops him off at his mum’s. He whines and is obnoxious until she listens to him; “ _Mooommmm,_ ” he’s wailing. Briana finally stops asking after his asthma treatments and eating habits to look down at him. “Dad said he’ll meet Jake, isn’t that great?”

Louis swallows and tucks his hands into his pockets. Shadows creep across Briana’s driveway like an oil spill. Summer’s given way to fall and sometimes it’s even a little cool with the sun beneath the horizon. “Sometime,” he says. “I mean, not tonight, obviously, or like, tomorrow. But sometime. Maybe.”

It’s the first time Briana’s even half-smiled at him since Louis heard about this boyfriend business. “Okay,” she says. “Sometime.”

Louis would still rather go to the dentist or have a colonoscopy than meet this bloke, but some of his fears of being _those parents_ – you know, the divorced or separated ones that can’t even be in the same room together and ruin all the family functions – is a little soothed. Louis didn’t want to be that guy very much.

After, he drives to Niall’s rather than back to his place. The house is always just a little too quiet without Freddie clattering around playing Pokemon at top volume or singing nursery songs at the top of his lungs.

Willie and Deo are sat in the living room when Louis lets himself into Niall’s house using the entry code Niall taught him in case of emergency. Louis throws himself down next to them and watches a couple of episodes of Trash Hunters, or whatever that show about old storage units is called. Louis spends most of the episode thinking about arranging a writing session with someone soon and how he definitely shouldn’t call Danielle to see how she’s doing. It’s still habit, after all this time.

“You lads want any nachos?” Niall ambles into the living room with the neck of a guitar clenched in his hand. He doesn’t seem all that surprised to see Louis.

“Yeah, yeah,” his cousins answer. Louis slides off the couch to follow Niall into the kitchen.

Louis fidgets with the crushed pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He wants one, but he doesn’t want to step outside and leave Niall just yet. “You’re been writing,” he accuses Niall. The humming is a dead giveaway. Louis shakes his head. “Talk about workaholics,” he sighs.

To his credit, Niall just says, “I never said I wasn’t!” and laughs. He loads a skillet up with a bunch of nacho chips and cheese and black beans on the hob. He’s in a pair of baggy jeans that keep slipping down his narrow hips and a loose t-shirt. For some reason, it means Louis can see the curve of his narrow spine, and the muscles in his forearms flex when he jostles the skillet over the flame. His shoulders seem broader than ever. He looks…

“Hot,” Niall hisses, and pops his finger into his mouth. “Ouch, ow, ow.”

Louis gives himself a shake. “Let me see,” he sighs. “Worse than Freddie, you are.”

Niall clucks his disapproval, but he lets Louis see his hand. His finger’s flushed red, a stark contrast to the white callouses on his fingertips. “Well?” Niall asks, when Louis’s just gone on holding his hand for no apparent reason.

“We’ve got to cut it off,” Louis says seriously, so Niall pulls his hand away with a laugh and tends to the nachos. “I told Briana I’d meet Jake. Her boyfriend. Like, someday.”

The dark, ugly thing in the pit of his stomach rears its head again, but Louis looks at Niall, and the proud smile on his face, and ignores it. “Good on you,” Niall says. “C’mon – these are ready.”

 

***

 

The ugly thing in Louis’s stomach stops letting him ignore it about a week later. Work calls Niall back to London at the start of October, and Louis sulks about it until Niall asks him why he’s being such a dickhead.

“What happened to getting off the ride?” Louis counters. He eyeballs Niall from under his fringe. 

“It’s a twelve step program,” Niall jokes. “You’re welcome to come with me, if you like. Bring Freddie, too.”

“Would that I could,” Louis laments. “I’ve got work, the lad’s got school, it’s all very boring and grown-up.”

“It’s preschool,” Niall says, soft, cajoling. “He doesn’t actually _have_ to be there.”

Which, oh.

Louis approaches Briana as carefully as he can. He offers to take the little lad to get his flu shot done because he knows how much she hates watching Freddie get poked with a needle, and then he and Fred pick up a hot chocolate for her on the way back. Freddie insists on having one, too, which _technically_ Louis knows he shouldn’t do, but whatever.

“You’re a tough guy, Fred,” Louis says, and rings Briana’s doorbell. “Taking that shot – why, I’d have cried.”

“Yeah, and I got this wicked band-aid out of it,” he enthuses. The band-aid has flowers on.

The door opens, and Austin says, “Hey Louis, hey Freddie. Is that hot chocolate? Did you get me one?”

“It’s too hot outside for hot chocolate,” says Louis. Then, “Here, take this one.” His is already half-drunk, so he gives Briana’s to Austin, instead.

He grins and takes a drink and says, “You won’t guess what Pokemon I found in the grass, Fred,” and then they go thundering upstairs to have a look.

Louis takes his time going into the kitchen. He lingers in the entry hall, looking at the succession of family portraits hung up in the hallway. There’s a ton of family photos from Jungwirth holidays over the years, too, even one of Bria with a tiny little baby Austin in her arms. Louis stops, hesitating, in front of the professional picture Briana had done with Freddie a couple of years ago.

They’d done some with and without Louis in them. It’s not like Louis hadn’t understood, ‘cos they’re not exactly a traditional family, but that’s probably what she’d have – what she wants to have – with Josh or Jack or whatever the hell his name is. And Louis’ll have his place, yeah, but it’ll be some other bloke tucking his kid in at night or waking up to rub his back and give him paracetamol when he comes down with a stomach bug or hearing his long, rambling stories. Replacing him isn’t the point, Louis knows; it’s having something altogether different.

Briana’s in the kitchen slicing carrots on a cutting board. “Hi, Lou,” she says. She tries a smile, and Louis offers a smile back, and then he musters up the courage to venture farther into the kitchen.

“No Tammi tonight?”

“She’s out for a jog,” Briana says. “I’m making stir fry tonight if you want to stay and eat.”

Louis nods and draws out a stool from the bar with his foot. “Sure.”

“Thanks again for taking him,” Briana says. “How’d he handle it? Did he cry?”

“Nah,” says Louis. “He held my hand and squeezed so tight I might’ve cried, though. We stopped for hot chocolate after and I got you some, but we gave it to Austin. He asked. Sorry.”

Briana has a faint smile on her face. “It’s alright, Louis.”

Louis spreads his fingers on the smooth marble surface of her counter. His knuckles are a little hairy, swollen from the cool night air, not nearly as tough and calloused as Niall’s. He gave up playing guitar too soon, reckoned it’d come easy after all that songwriting he’d done but it turns out they’re not the same at all. Besides, Liam was always better at thinking up a melody than Louis.

“I, um,” he starts. “I had an ulterior motive for taking the lad out today.”

Briana looks up at him. “I figured,” she says.

Louis shrugs. He’s transparent; he knows. “Cos I wanted to ask – I mean, I’d like you to consider – er, that is, I’d like to take him to London for a few days.”

“What for?”

“Niall’s got a gig,” says Louis. “And we could pop in to visit my mum, and some of my sisters.”

Briana puts the carrots and celery and onions she chopped into a bowl, then grabs a couple of bright red bell peppers from the fridge. “Niall has a gig?”

“Something to do with Oxjam,” says Louis. “It’s a charity thing. It’s not like – there won’t be any drugs or anything, c’mon.”

Briana casts him a doubtful look. That’s fair. “You and Niall want to take Freddie abroad?”

“Don’t say it like that,” Louis says. “You make it sound like – like we’re together. It’s a bit odd.”

“You _do_ spend an awful lot of time together,” Briana says.

Louis chooses to take it as a joke. He laughs. “It’s just,” Louis takes a deep breath. “He’s got this break now and then he’s got his pop star stuff to do, and I’ll be here being a dad, so. I’m not lying when I say it’s just this once, Bria.”

Unless Louis’s eyes are deceiving him, Briana actually looks a little pitying. “You can take Freddie to England with you,” she says, “if you come to dinner Tuesday night to meet Jake.”

Louis makes a face like he’s just sucked on a lemon. Then he remembers to try to be an adult. “Eurgh.”

“That’s the deal,” Briana says. “Besides, Niall is always over at your place. Freddie comes home talking about the pillow fort the three of you built in the living room and soccer and mini golf all the time.”

“It’s not –” Louis starts again.

Briana holds up her hand patiently. “I know. But if it were, you’d get it, wouldn’t you? I mean, you do get it?”

“Everybody loves Niall,” Louis mutters, for no damn good reason.

“And you’ll learn to love Jake, at least until I don’t anymore, and then we can hate him together.” Briana offers Louis a smile. “Okay?”

Louis huffs and groans and sighs and says, “Oh, alright.” It’s not exactly a happy or exciting moment for him. It just feels inevitable.

He goes back to Niall’s again. There’s not much point being home unless Freddie or Niall are going to be there, after all. Stan and that lot are good fun but they’re still mostly in the UK, and Louis can’t stand the way the house feels when it’s empty but for him. It’s like he can hear it echoing. And he doesn’t want to be alone right now. He doesn’t want to be like this around other people, but he _really_ doesn’t want to be alone.

He used to visit the beach with his family when he was a kid and hold those twisting seashells up to his ear. “Do you hear the ocean?” Johannah asked, her eyes creasing with her smile. (‘Course it wasn’t the ocean he heard, it was his own heartbeat, he’d found out later.) “What do you think?”

“I don’t like it,” Louis remembers saying, for reasons he couldn’t explain. He still doesn’t. It sounds a little too much like time counting down, is all.

“What happened?” Niall asks, when Louis wanders into his sun room and finds Niall on a lounger in a pair of shorts, his guitar in his lap.

Louis grimaces and drops onto the overstuffed couch. It’s a sun-bleached shade of light green, soft. He could probably go to sleep here. “Having dinner with Jake,” Louis says. He stares up at the skylight in the ceiling.

“Ah,” says Niall. “You okay?”

“Course,” says Louis. “It’s no big deal.”

Niall lets him have that one and nods and goes about plucking out a desultory little song on his guitar, all minor chords, something sort of sad and eerie.

“You know I used to think I was like Peter Pan,” Louis says suddenly. He wants Niall to pay attention to him; he doesn’t care that he can’t think of anything good to say. He feels a bit like an open welt leaking pus into the space around him, or a leaky cyanide balloon, and he can’t stop himself. “When we were young, I mean. When I was. Now I feel more like Captain Hook.”

“How so?” asks Niall. His playing grows quieter. Louis’s always liked that about him, like the guitar is a third arm he can effortlessly sprout. Niall always seems to fill the space he’s provided, whether it’s him and his guitar onstage in front of thousands of people or it’s just them on a tour bus in the middle of nowhere, USA, having a quiet chat from their separate bunks.

“‘Cos I can hear the crocodile ticking,” says Louis. He closes his eyes.

Niall nudges him awake. It can’t be too much later, Louis thinks fuzzily, he hasn’t rolled onto his stomach and drooled all over the pillow yet. “You staying here tonight?” Niall asks.

“Yeah,” says Louis. Yeah.

“C’mon, to bed with you,” Niall says. He’s put his guitar aside and helps Louis find his feet. He leaves his arm curled around Louis’s back after Louis’s managed to haul himself upright. Louis doesn’t need the help, but he doesn’t ask Niall to take his arm away either.

Louis turns his face into Niall’s shoulder instead. He smells so good and sweet, woodsy and spicy; Louis almost wants to take a bite out of him. “Sorry I’m such – sorry I’m so old,” Louis says. The words, “Sorry for disappointing you,” stick in his throat. He thinks maybe Niall can hear them anyway.

Niall lets go of Louis so Louis can sit on the edge of Niall’s guest bed. A faint, childish yearning opens up in his chest that Niall will sleep next to him, like they’re teenagers two to a bed in a cheap hotel room again. Louis scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’m being maudlin, Niall, never you mind.”

“You ever want to go back?” Niall says. He sits down beside Louis on the edge of the mattress. He puts his elbows on his knees and rubs his face. _You_ do _spend an awful lot of time together._ Louis tries to imagine Niall as someone he’d date. Louis can see the bony nubs of his spine like stones in a footpath marching up his back, and that strange little space behind his ear where he hasn’t got any hair. “To the band, and – and us, I mean.”

 _Us,_ Louis thinks. It’s such a silly little word; he could cry over it. “Sometimes,” Louis admits. That’s not true. “A little, all the time,” he corrects himself. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” says Niall, “and no.” Louis can hear Niall’s breath in the quiet dark; a little uneven, a little unsteady, one of Louis’s favorite sounds. Their shoulders brush together, and their knees, and it’s a little like they’re a couple of pylons with electrical current run between them. It stands Louis’s hair on end and upsets the rhythm of his heart.

It sort of feels like – but no, it can’t be. “Niall,” Louis tries.

“‘Cos, like,” Niall’s saying, “I couldn’t have done this, before –” His fingertips graze Louis’s chin in the dark and it’s like the bottom drops out of everything. Louis’s blood rushes hot in his ears and in his veins and a fierce appetite stirs awake in the bottom of his stomach. Louis wants to put his hands on Niall, and his mouth.

“Are – are you trying to kiss me?” Louis cuts him off.

“Yeah,” Niall answers.

“Well –” Louis stands up in a rush, putting some space between himself and Niall. The side Niall was pressed all up against feels far too cold and honestly, Louis just can’t _do this_ right now, fuck, doesn’t Niall get that? “Don’t.”

Niall demands, “Why not?”

The ugly, horrid thing in Louis’s chest sets upon him like it was just waiting. It’s a little bit of everything: his son’s new maybe-someday-stepdad and Niall acting like he’s here for long when Louis’s life is just another stop on his tour and Louis not being as fucking great as everyone else in his life is. He used to _be_ someone, and if not that, he used to be part of something great.

“Because you’re Niall,” Louis says. Niall’s face shutters in pain and Louis realizes that he’s just said the absolute worst thing; that he’s just hurt someone he loves dearly; that he’s just snatched this chance at happiness away from himself for reasons he can’t even begin to explain.

Louis should clarify: He’s Niall. He’s the one thing in all five years of the band that never went sideways. He was the only constant glimmer of light, the only one of them who never went a little mad. He’s _Niall_.

Louis doesn’t. He can’t. He’s too angry with himself. “Christ, Niall,” Louis says. The words hurt even as they come out, and he wants to grab himself by the shoulders and shake him and scream, “ _What are you doing? Stop this!_ ” but he can’t. “Couldn’t you have let well enough alone?”

Niall’s tucked his chin to his chest. Louis watches his hands curl and uncurl into fists at his sides. He takes a deep breath, and looks up, and the bottom keeps dropping out, and Louis keeps falling. “Let things as they are? Forever? Things change, Louis, and I know you.” He stops, and swallows. “I know you. And I know – I know you want me, too.”

It’s too much; he’s not _wrong_ , is the thing. Louis can see it now in the shadow of every time he went to touch Niall’s arm or fondle a bit of his hair, and it stings to have lost something before he ever really had it. Louis puts his hands over his ears. He looks like the furious, tyrannical toddler he is at heart and that – the knowledge that Niall must see, and pity him – is the last straw.

“Christ, Lou,” Niall just says, his eyes too seeing, too knowing. Louis shoulders past him, barrels down the hall, and stumbles out to the driveway and into his car so that he won’t have to hear whatever Niall has to say next.

Louis puts his head down on the steering wheel and lets out a sob.

 

 

***

 

Louis leaves his car parked half-in, half-out of the street – honestly, he’s lucky he got it here at all, he’s got no memory of the drive – and stumbles up the walk, his head positively ringing with silence. After every horrid, stupid, insincere thing Louis said there’s the look on Niall’s face echoing inside the empty house of Louis’s head. Not like he’d just been disappointed, but like he wasn’t very much surprised.

He presses the buzzer once and then, when no one opens it, just leans his weight against the doorbell. He can hear it ringing inside the quiet house like a phone jangling in the distance, and it sets a peculiar lump in his throat, like he’s wishing someone would pick up. Maybe he feels a little like a ringing phone, sometimes.

A man opens the door. He’s got a mop-top of brown hair and pillow creases on his face, and a sleep crusty in the corner of his eye. Louis’s breath catches. This is Jack, then. John. Whatever the fuck. Louis peels himself off the doorjamb and stands up as straight as he can. _I’m in pieces over you_ , he thinks, and knows it isn’t entirely true. He’s just part. “Where’s Bri?” Louis asks. He can hear the petulance in his own tone.

“Sleeping,” the guy says. “You’re –” the guy’s eyes widen in recognition, “You’re –” And he stops, his gaze flicking over Louis slowly. He looks more awake now. “You’re not meant to be here,” he says, at last. “Did something happen?”

“Yes, something happened, everything happens, or haven’t you heard?” Louis snaps. “If you’re not going to let me in you might as well go find Briana, please.”

“Lou,” Briana says. Her voice comes out scratchy, over-tired, the way it’d done when Freddie was just a tiny little baby who woke them up every two hours like clockwork. “What are you doing here?” She appears under Jim’s arm with her hair in a snarled mess, and dark circles under her eyes.

Louis says, “I want to see Freddie.”

There’s a terrible handful of seconds where Louis can see her considering it. It’s awful for a number of reasons: that she gets to decide whether he can see his own son, that she’s forced to consider the choice at all, that there’s this other man in this house who doesn’t have to ask. Louis’s never fancied himself in love with Briana but sometimes he fucking wishes they’d have made it, somehow. Doesn’t everybody want that? A happy family?

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Briana says.

Louis takes a breath. “With all due respect, if you don’t let me see my kid, I’ll –” he draws up short. His words still linger like a threat.

The two of them draw up and closer together. It’s the worst fucking thing in the world to see, two people who care about Louis’s son banding together to – to keep him from him. It’s Briana who says, “I don’t think you’re in any place to talk to him tonight, Lou – why don’t you come in and have some coffee, and we can talk?”

It’s a generous offer, really. Louis’s too hurt to feel grateful for it. “That’s bullshit, and you know it,” he says. “He’s my kid and I want to talk to him, so you’re going to let me talk to him.”

“Hey, man,” Joe starts, and Briana folds her arms over her chest, her face set. Louis loses his mind briefly. He swings at Jeff’s face. He must catch him off-guard, because he stumbles back a bit, enough to knock Briana off balance. Louis’s just watching her catch herself on the columns she has in the entryway, his stomach sank right through the floor, when John swings back.

Louis doesn’t remember the punch, exactly; it’s like one moment he was stood in the entryway regretting every choice that’d brought him to this moment, and the next he was thrown on his arse on the cold porch, his boxed ears ringing. His face feels like it’s on fire, though a thin trickle of dark liquid seeps down from his cheekbone. It feels cool in the night air.

Briana puts herself in the middle. All of a hundred pounds in a tatty pair of pajama pants and her hair in the messiest bun Louis’s ever seen, and she looks like a Titan, like some kind of Greek god. Louis’s heart shrivels in his chest. “I think you should leave,” she says, brittle calm, icy. “Do you really want Freddie to see you like this?” Briana asks.

“No,” Louis whispers. No, he doesn’t. He slinks back to his car like a dog with its tail between its legs. He starts the engine numbly, steers himself home on autopilot. When he gets there, he goes in and rifles through his liquor cabinet for a bottle of something strong, and then he drinks till he can’t remember why he’s hurt anymore.

He stays that way for six days. He and the lads go out every night and knock back shots till the alcohol stops burning and starts tasting sweet on the way down. Louis threads his way through the crowd at every club till he’s as close as he can get to the bank of speakers blasting EDM over the din, and then he closes his eyes and lets his mind go full and empty with the tickle of booze and pulsing beats.

Three o’clock means stumbling out into the backseat of the nearest car, his stomach cramping in on itself. Asking the driver to stop for takeaway, leaving half of it behind when the car drops him off at his place to sleep for a few hours, wake up with a killer hangover, and pump enough coffee into himself to gear up, call in sick at work, and do it again.

By the end of it, Louis’s so tired that waking up feels like swimming to the surface from the bottom of the ocean. It must be late morning; the light stretching across his messy bedroom floor isn’t the pale gray or deep gold of sunrise, but a muted yellow. Midday.

Louis hates middles. Beginnings and endings are either good or bad; it’s the middle that’s a mix, that complicates things. It’s a bit like writing a song, really; he can spend ages on the verses and still know that people won’t come away knowing them by heart. They’re just what carries you from beginning to end, the parts that matter.

It’s a bit of a weird thought, really. Louis fumbles for his phone off the bedside table, trying not to move too much because his head is absolutely killing. He’s blearily typed half her name into his contacts before he remembers. “M – U – ” One letter left, but she won’t be there. It hurts just as much as it does every time. Louis’s never sure which is worse: the feeling that his mum’s been gone forever, or that she’s just stepped out of the room and he could call her back.

His shoddy attempt at hiding from himself collapses on him. He feels very alone, and very lonely, in his rumpled unwashed bed and last night’s spilled liquor. His hair smells like dried vom and the backs of his hands are layered with club stamps. And he doesn’t have anyone to call. Louis throws his legs over the side of the bed like he can unseat his mind like a train racing down the tracks just by moving around. He steps into the loo reckoning a shower might do him some good and is met with his own reflection, which draws him up short.

Bedraggled, red-eyed, hollow-cheeked; Louis looks wrecked, and not just after one night of being an absolute dick to someone he’s always loved, but in a way that goes deeper than that. There’s not something terrible coiled in his stomach, after all; he’s the terrible thing. Louis manages to get the light switch off after three, four swipes at the wall, and then he stumbles back over to his phone.

Louis calls Lottie. “Louis,” she says. The relief in her voice is palpable.

“I’m alright,” he says. He wants to comfort her. Maybe he wants to comfort himself, too. It’s an absolutely stupid way to start, of course.

“Louis,” Lottie says again. Her voice sounds hoarse. Maybe she’s getting sick? Oh, jeez, Louis doesn’t even know what time it is back home.

 _Home._ He chokes down a sob, his knuckles stinging against his teeth. “Sorry to bother you, Lots, Christ, I should’ve checked the time. Never you mind –”

“Don’t,” Lottie cuts him off. She sounds stern and fierce and perhaps a little angry; Mum would’ve sounded soft and concerned, gentle. Still, she sounds enough like their mother that Louis drops down on the toilet lid and draws his knees up to his chest. There’s a couple of empty bottles of vodka on the bathroom counter. Louis glares at them. He’s got nothing to blame this on but himself and on top of being hysterically embarrassing, Louis’s just fucking grateful to hear his sister’s voice.

He shuts his eyes. If he was a kid, he’d tell his mum, “I don’t feel well.” Mum would cluck her tongue and say, “Why don’t you stay home from school for the day, hm? We’ll have soup and watch telly.” Louis wishes he could be eight years old again. Just for a moment. Like hell he wishes.

“Come home,” Lottie says. Her tone leaves no room for argument. 

And Louis, who’d rather hide himself than face the absolute fucking mess he’s just made of his whole life, wants so bad to say yes. The parts of his life he cares most about, anyway.

“C’mon,” Lottie adds. “For me.”

She knows him too well; it works like a charm. Louis books himself a ticket home.

 

***

 

Louis takes such a long, hot shower that his skin tingles when he finally cuts the water off. He puts on a pair of clean jeans and a fresh t-shirt and hoodie. He brushes his teeth and tosses a couple of jumpers and an old snapback into his bag, and then the car he called honks, so Louis goes out to ride to the airport. He can’t even remember if he locked the door behind him.

Maybe Jessie, his PA, can check for him. The thought of her reminds him of all the work he’s not been doing, and it’s with no little sense of dread that Louis finally checks his messages. Emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages pour in like a landslide. Louis stuffs his phone to the bottom of the bag till it’s mostly still and quiet, and then he draws it out just to text Jessie about the locks and to tell work he won’t be in. It’s giving her a shit job, having her deal with the mess he’s made of things, but Louis just can’t handle it right now.

After so many years thinking he could handle anything, everything, that’s a sobering realization.

Louis sips a watery Jack and coke on the plane and sleeps as much as possible. They touch down once, in New York, to gas up the plane, and Louis only jostles awake at liftoff, when he’s leaving America in the western distance behind him.

As much as he’s running away, Louis’s still relieved to be gone. Maybe he can just stay up here on this plane, in his own private middle, for the rest of his life. He’ll never touch the ground again and meet his ending. Louis sighs, tips his head against the window, and sleeps some more. He slips onto the tiny plane from Heathrow to the Doncaster airport, and he’s not sure whether he’s more relieved or disappointed that nobody seems to recognize him.

The twins are there to meet him at the airport. Louis does a double take when he sees them, they’re so big and tall now, practically not even teenagers anymore. Adults. Louis wants to cry. He settles for adjusting the strap of his bag and meeting the two of them in a hug. They feel slim and willowy and so strong in his arms. It’s been so long, Louis realizes, since he’s seen them. He was foolish to think they would stop changing like a couple of mosquitoes preserved in amber just ‘cos he wasn’t there to see it. He’s been such a fool he can’t even believe it.

“You need a shave,” Daisy smiles. She slides her soft palm over Louis’s cheek. Louis tells himself he doesn’t lean into it.  

“Do you want to stop on the way back for takeaway?” Phoebe asks. She deftly slips Louis’s bag off his shoulder and onto hers.

“Yeah,” Louis says. He clears his throat. “Yes to both sounds good.”

Phoebe drives. Louis presses his forehead against the cool window and swallows against his cramping stomach and the bitter aftertaste of booze still in his mouth. He wants another drink. He’s tired of wanting another drink. Doncaster lies just outside the chilly car window. It’s one of those places that isn’t particularly mentionable unless you know it well. Green grass rolls up to the shade of copses of multicolored trees. The sky hangs overhead, a motionless, lifeless gray sheet of battered metal.

To Louis, it looks like a wonderland. He drinks it all in eagerly and begrudges himself for staying way for so long, for coming back like this. He used to have such great expectations, and now –

Anyway.

“Dan and the twins are at home,” Daisy says. Louis gives his head a little shake; he’s so used to hearing them called that, but he supposes a collective like that – well, it’s something you only really use for kids, who can be lumped together somehow.

He nods and swallows. “Okay,” he says.

Phoebe’s the one who comes right out with it. “You look a mess, brother,” she says, and sweetens it with a smile.

Louis stops short. He thinks about what she must want him to say. It’s with a sick feeling, low in his stomach, that he says, “I’ll, uh, brighten up for them.”

Phoebe nods. Daisy leans forward from the backseat to tuck her chin over Louis’s seat. He can feel her breath on his shoulder, and he tips his head back to look at her. She’s squinty-smiling at him. It’s more than he deserves, really. “Lottie’s cooking,” she says.

Louis’s stomach turns. “Oh, dear.”

“Special for you,” Daisy adds, and they both laugh.

A faint, familiar feeling stirs in Louis’s chest. “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” he says. “She’ll expect you to eat it, too.”

The twins pause, then groan in unison. Louis tucks his smile into his collar.

 

***

 

Louis feels a bit like a ghost in his own home. It’s not really his home, of course – it’s Dan’s, and the littlest kids, and the rest of theirs, too, really, when they’re home from uni or visiting – but some part of Louis will always belong to his mum, and this house belonged to her too.

The twins are almost six now and absolutely fizzing with energy. Louis spends as much time with them as he can. They’re not old enough to resent him for hiding out in LA for so long, so that makes them easy to be around; they’re just a little older than his son, so that makes them hard to be around. Louis spends two days lying around on the couch shying away from talking about himself, and then he runs out of good excuses, so he makes himself busy instead.

He immerses himself in packing the twins’ lunches and escorting them to the bus stop just like he used to do when Phoebe and Daisy were little, and he feels a bit like time is a flat circle. After he either goes home and talks in circles with Fizzy and Lottie, if they’re there, trying to avoid saying anything at all and probably saying everything instead, or he goes for a walk.

Wandering around the well-trodden footpaths of his English village always makes Louis feel like a character from a Jane Austen novel, or Dickinson, or someone. One of those old dead people. Sometimes he narrates it to himself. There’s always lots of heavy prose and poetic language and mainly Louis wonders what the fuck he’s doing here beyond drying out and hiding out. At the very least, the booze-fueled craving headaches go away after the first couple of days.

Lottie’s a decent cook when she decides to be. She and Tom are banging pots and pans about in the kitchen while Louis twiddles his thumbs at the bar and the TV blares one of those terrible gossip shows. Lottie and Tom are absolutely, horribly in love. They remind Louis of the way he used to be about Danielle and he feels more than a little cross with them. He wants to pinch them both between the eyes, and also protect them from every terrible thing in the world. Louis gives a start when Niall’s name comes up. He’s been doing _so_ good not thinking about him, too.

“So, your new makeup line,” Louis says, loudly, over a beautiful blond woman recapping Niall’s latest tabloid fodder.

Lottie pings at once, of course, and clocks the TV. “Aren’t you guys friends?” Lottie asks.

It’s a ridiculous question. “That’s a ridiculous question,” Louis says. “Of course we are.”

Lottie looks around – to make sure the little ones are out of sight; Louis knows how these thigns go. “Then how come you didn’t call him?” she asks, as lightly as she can.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Louis says, “but I’ve not been very well, Lottie.”

The look she gives him could level mountains, Louis reckons. “I have,” Lottie says, stiffly. She does Louis the small favor of muting the TV herself, only to say, soft but intent, “I’m going to take roses to mum’s grave. Later. If you want to come.”

Louis feels himself go freezing cold all over, then boiling hot. “I can’t,” he says. He’s only been the one time, for her burial, and – “I can’t,” Louis just repeats.

Lottie purses her lips. “Big brother,” she starts. Louis prepares himself to hear something devastating. He seems to be doing that a lot lately. Perhaps he ought to think about why. …or he could just keep ignoring it until his life blows up in his face even more than it’s already done. “Not joking, but you should really figure out something you _can_ do.”

His little sister is a right pain in the arse, Louis reckons, and too old for her twenty-something years to boot. But she also has a point. Louis totes one of the younger twin’s discarded My Little Pony notebooks to the local pub, where he draws out a seat at the bar and orders chips and a water. He makes a list of things he ought to do.

  1. Check in with work
  2. Apologize to Jessie for having her deal with work. Buy flowers ???
  3. Order some new clothes (Louis’s current jeans keep climbing up his arse, and he only has the one pair)
  4. Get a haircut
  5. Talk to Niall
  6. Freddie



Louis taps the nib of his pen against the mostly blank page. He takes a sip of water, eats a chip, and keeps looking at the page. There’s something about the arrangement of words on his little sister’s notebook that keeps drawing his eyes back down.

It’s sort of like a short list of all the things that matter to him, Louis realizes. It’s a bit like a song, really. The verses: work, the business of living; the bridge: Niall, the prechorus: Freddie; the chorus: all of melded together, somehow. Louis keeps sitting, looking at Niall’s name.

The bartender clears her throat quietly. “Can I help you?” she asks. Louis glances around and realizes the sun’s set while he’s been tucked into this quiet, cozy pub.

“I was going to snog my best friend,” Louis says.

The bartender scratches her nose. “Yeah?” she asks.

“I’ve never wanted to snog him before,” Louis says. “I’ve never even particularly wanted to snog a bloke before.” Probably he’d have realized the way he was feeling sooner. It’s a strange realization to come to in too-tight jeans and garlic breath.

“So you panicked because your feelings for your best friend are changing?” she asks.

Louis narrows his eyes. “I don’t remember mentioning panic,” he says.

She just shrugs. “You look like you panicked. Maybe you’re afraid of change.”

Louis considers this. “Let’s go back to snogging boys,” Louis says. “Maybe I’m panicking about that.”

“So I take it you don’t want anything?” the bartender sighs.

“Another water, please. And an order of onion rings.”

The bartender trots off to fill his order and help the rest of the pub’s customers. Louis goes back to staring at his notebook.

He decides the easiest notches on his to-do list are to buy some new clothes and get a haircut, so he and Fizzy take the Doris and Ernie to town with them. Louis gets a fifteen-pound haircut from a salon inside a mall, and then he picks up a couple of pairs of skinny Levis and some soft t-shirts.

Fizzy and Louis split a cinnamon sugar pretzel on a bench while the twins go round and round on an antique carousel blaring a jangling piano tune. They’re maybe a little too big for it, but Louis’s not about to tell them so. He’d let them be kids forever if he could.

“It’s weird they’ll never know her,” Fizzy says, almost out of the blue. Louis goes tense all over. “I mean, I know they were two,” she allows. “But like, that’s not knowing her very well, is it?”

In his head, Louis’s riding in the passenger seat. His mum’s sat in the driver’s seat, her soft, skilled hands assured on the wheel. She smiles over at him. They’re talking about his grades, and whether he’ll go to uni. The X-Factor isn’t even dreamt of yet. “You know I’m your biggest fan, right?” she asks.

Louis extends his arm out the open window, spreads his fingers to feel the wind rush past his skin. “Yeah,” he says.

“Fizzy,” Louis clears his throat.

Fizzy just drops her head onto Louis’s shoulder. “You should put taking me to Paris on your to-do list,” she says, then smiles. With her eyes closed, she looks about five years old. Louis circles his arm around her shoulders. “The things you’ll do to avoid doing things,” she says.

“Shh,” Louis says, and doesn’t really mean it. He and Fizzy wave at the twins every time the carousel brings them back round, and Louis thinks about the song in his notebook, and middles, and things he ought to do. “I miss my kid,” Louis blurts.

“So do I,” Fizzy says. Louis’s throat clogs up tight. There’s something he wants to articulate but he’s not sure how or even if he _should_ ; he’s the invulnerable big brother, strong, unbreakable, even. Louis doesn’t want to take that version of himself away from his sisters. He doesn’t want to take it away from himself, either.

Louis clears his throat. “I didn’t mean to keep him from you,” he says. “I, like – it was just so hard –”

“Shh,” Fizzy echoes. “I know.”

 _I wanted to be strong for you_ , Louis thinks. The words go unsaid. Like so many others, Louis knows they’ll end up in a song someday.

“Can we get ice cream?” Ernie asks, his hair flopping into his eyes. Doris clasps her little hands under her cherubic chin.

Louis and Fizzy exchange a look. “Well, alright,” Louis says. The twins do a little victory dance. It’s so easy to make them happy; Louis loves it so much.

October marches toward end, and Louis thinks about missing Freddie in his Halloween costume, his plastic bucket clutched in eager hand. He tells his family he has to go back to LA one by one, worried about how they’ll take it. He doesn’t want to just up and leave them again, but he can’t make any false promises about how soon he’ll be back, not when it took so much to get him here.

Not when this place is still so. Haunted, really.

They toast to him at dinner the night before his flight leaves. Dan gets choked up saying, “Your mother would be so happy to see us all here together,” and Louis escapes into the loo so the others won’t see him tear up. He remembers that horrible morning in LA, his face hollow and empty, desolate, like scorched earth.

He supposes he looks better now. He’s been eating and his face is mostly clean-shaven. The mirror doesn’t show anything beneath the skin, though. Louis puts his hand over his chest like his heart has a bullet wound; he thinks he can feel an arrhythmia, something deep inside twisted and broken.

The closest he can reckon the feeling to is a fire hydrant on a busy city street, or an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Something from the very heart of him that should be brought up carefully keeps leaking out. And the worst part is, it was always there in the first place.

It’s not something particularly easy to talk about. Louis sits down on the toilet lid and rings Niall.

His phone rings and rings, and Louis thinks about what to say. He hasn’t thought of anything brilliant or helpful by the time Niall’s voicemail kicks on, so he hangs up in a hurry and stuffs his phone into his pocket. He slips back out to the dinner table dry-eyed and dry-witted, and his family jostles to fit him in.

“Don’t wait for another breakdown to bring you back,” Fizzy says, elegant and sharp, as she hugs him goodbye in the airport.

Lottie’s a little gentler. “Take care of yourself,” she says.

Louis fights the feeling that he’s going to cry again. “You did such a good job,” he whispers to her, like they’re sharing another secret. He swallows a couple of times. “Taking care of all of them, I mean. I wish –”

“So do I,” Lottie assures him. She doesn’t bother to blink away the tears welling up in her eyes. They spill over her lashes like a natural disaster, and Louis realizes for maybe the first time just how strong his sister is. His sisters are.

“I will,” Louis says, and hitches a smile onto his face.

He gets on the plane back to LA feeling like he’s leaving unfinished business behind. It’s not the worst feeling.

 

***

 

Louis settles back into LA life more like a kid doing a cannonball into a pool than a diver smoothly slipping into the water. He’s missed the whole second half of his tambourine-playing duet’s recording process, and two of the acts he was courting signed with other labels while he was busy trying to get his head back on right.

His first act of business is to text all his hard-partying mates and invite them out to go-karting. When they ask why he doesn’t want to go clubbing, Louis just replies that he’s too old to party every night, and leaves it at that. It’s true, after all. If some of them stop replying to his texts, that’s fine, too. Louis doesn’t blame them for enabling him, or anything; he just doesn’t want to do it anymore.

Jessie proves harder to sync back up with. She’s cold and aloof with him when they meet up for lunch and their usual check-ins. The third time he passes a gift over the table to her – this time, it’s a cookie bouquet – she clucks her tongue agitatedly and says, “Lou, I’m waiting for you to ask me what I want.”

Oh. That’s rather a lot easier, Louis reckons. “How can I make it up to you?” he asks, sliding his hand over hers.

“For what, exactly?” Jessie stalls.

Louis draws a deep breath in, and lets it out slowly. “Well,” he starts. “Erm, for up and leaving. Um, and leaving quite a mess for you to clean up…in the papers and, er, with the label. Urm, and for the blueberry scones…and for forgetting you were allergic to blueberries…”

Jessie finally relents. “It’s okay, Louis,” she says. She slides her hand from under his and pats the back of his tattooed hand. “I knew what I was signing up for when I took you on.”

Louis frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jessie pinches the straw of her iced strawberry lemonade. “Well,” she says.

“You saw that coming?” Louis demands. “You didn’t warn me?” He sits back in his seat. “Well, hell,” he says.

“I got you the numbers of some grief counselors,” Jessie follows up with. She pushes the sheet across the varnished wood tabletop toward him. The paper is bright white, a stark contrast to this dimly lit café. Louis picks up the page. He feels rather outside himself. Her voice when she says, “It could’ve been much worse,” is grave and serious. And not wrong. Louis tucks the pages into his bag when he leaves, half-surprised he didn’t just push them away.

He drives past Briana’s on the way home. Part of him hopes that she and Freddie will be outside playing in the yard, and he can pull up and say hello and play a round of footie or basketball, and everything can be like it was. They aren’t, and he doesn’t. Louis goes home alone.

 

***

 

The fact is, if Niall thinks he can ignore Louis’s ten thousand calls and get rid of him that easily, he’s got another thing coming. It only takes Louis two weeks to wrangle tickets to a show. He’s been keeping a weather eye on the performance roster, and First Aid Kit sends up all sorts of red flags; it’s just the kind of thing Niall would love.

It’s with no little rush of victory that Louis spots Niall slipping backstage to chat to the band. He probably wants to tell them how much he loved their set, and their voices, and how minimal their stage setup was, not that Louis spent the whole gig thinking about it.

“Niall,” Louis says, when Niall pokes his head into the dressing room. There’s a pink flush spread over his cheeks, and his hair is tousled. He looks faintly buzzed, and happy, and Louis just wants to touch. He can’t stop thinking of the look on Niall’s face last time Louis saw him, and how maybe it wasn’t pity at all.

Niall startles. His eyes settle on Louis, and he sidles the rest of the way into the room with a roll of his eyes and a muttered, “Christ, Lou,” that sends Louis’s heart into a pounding spiral.

He swallows and coughs. He’d been so busy staking out this battered brown couch in a dressing room strewn with extra guitars and dozens of other bands’ signatures that he forgot to think about how little Niall might want to see him. Louis’s never been very good at apologies.

“I – sorry,” he says.

Niall waits. “Seriously?” he says. “That’s all?”

And Louis, invulnerable superhero that he swears he is, fucking short-circuits. “I think we were about to kiss,” he says.

Niall colors instantly. It’s dead endearing. The tone of his voice: less so. “And you told me no, Lou.” Louis opens his mouth to respond, but it’s like he’s pulled the cork out of him, and Niall pushes on,  “It’s been weeks, you realize that? Weeks without hearing from you, and the paps taking shots of you puking in the gutter, and no word from you. And that’s all you have to say?”

“Why were you going to kiss me?” Louis asks, instead. It feels very important to get an answer to this. Louis thinks it might affect things quite a bit. There’s so much he wants to talk to Niall about, too, like how he’s thinking of seeing a counselor and isn’t that wild and how much older Louis’s family is and how everywhere Louis went back in Donny there were posters of Niall’s stupid handsome face, and Louis was so proud of him. But he just waits for Niall to say something.

Louis can see Niall chewing on the inside of his cheek. He looks poised on the edge of something, teetering one of two ways; Louis holds his breath, and then he says, “I don’t –”

The dressing room door bursts open, and a couple of Swedish musicians pours into the room. It’s instantaneous, the way Niall slaps a smile across his face. It’s not lying, exactly. Louis would call it compartmentalizing. “I loved the show!” Niall starts, and Louis hops off the couch and pushes past him into the hallway with a muttered “I’ve got to go,” that’s very true. That’s not true at all.

He doesn’t really go. He just finds the nearest fire exit and stomps out to the alley at the back of the venue. It was probably humming with people earlier as they loaded and unloaded the vans and fans waited eagerly for the band to appear, but now it’s quiet, and cold, and very still.  He reaches for a cig and his lighter out of habit, his hands cupping the tiny flame so it won’t go out. His eyes burn, but Louis couldn’t cry if he tried.

It’s a bit like déjà vu when Niall steps through, his hat pulled down low, his collar popped up round the back of his neck. Sneaking out, then. Doing his James Bond act. Louis leaves his arse parked on the curb, his elbows propped up on his knees, and tries to think of something to say. Nothing comes up.

“Sorry about that,” Niall says. Louis can’t help but look up at him. “I didn’t want to have to explain anything to them, like.” He pauses. “Can I get a light?”

Mutely, Louis holds out his crumpled pack of cigarettes. Niall selects one and pops it between his lips. Then he leans in for Louis to light. It takes Louis’s thumb several tries to get a spark.  

The sight of Niall with a lit cig in his mouth does something strange to Louis’s innards. He thought it might be sort of hot, if he’d thought about it at all. Instead, the sight of it turns everything upside down: Niall’s fresh, mostly-unlined face, and his beautiful lungs, and that voice. It’s not quite rage but something similar to it that colors everything red and makes Louis’s heart kick into overdrive.

“I, like,” he struggles for words. It’s so easy to talk when you don’t think about what you’re saying; it’s so much harder to make an effort of it without a melody and some verses. “I might’ve been afraid that you would leave me, so I tried to make you go.” When he says it aloud, it sounds like bollocks.

“I know,” Niall says. And waits.

Louis swallows. “And what I did, like. That wasn’t your fault.”

“I know.”

His guts twist into an impossibly tight knot. The fact that Niall’s smoking doesn’t help anything at all, or the way he’s looking at him from under the brim of his cap. Louis can’t see his face, and he feels desperately as though he’s already lost Niall. The thought that he’d never had him at all – even when they were kids, and Louis could’ve sworn he was five people, not one – makes him think he’ll be sick to his stomach.

One thing nobody tells you when someone dies: you’ll feel bad for moving on. It can feel like leaving them behind.

 _Things change,_ Niall said. Louis knows it, too. Maybe once upon a time his sisters needed Louis to be tough and unbreakable, but he’s seen them now, and he knows it not to be true anymore. “So,” Louis says. “Give me another chance.”

Niall shifts his weight from foot to foot. The cherry’s burnt down enough that Louis can see the deep blue light of his eyes in the midst of this murky alleyway. “Why should I?”

“Because,” Louis musters confidence even he’s not sure he has. He thinks of Niall washing up on his doorstep like the survivor of some terrible shipwreck, dead successful and lost as a wayward traveler without a map. He thinks of Niall with Freddie, and the way he still shoots Louis a text before he pops round because he’s not sure of his welcome.

Louis hasn’t got much. He’s got a family. “I think I could make you really fucking happy.”

“C’mere, then,” Niall sighs. “Reckon I’ve been waiting long enough.”

Louis tries to stand up and subtly brush off his arse like he’s not hyper-conscious of Niall’s eyes on him. It’s a bit strange squaring up to kiss one of your best mates, to be honest. Louis feels every inch the awkward teenager he stopped being ages ago.

Niall’s face gives nothing away, which is how Louis knows he’s anxious as hell. Louis plucks the cig out of Niall’s mouth and stomps it out underfoot with no small amount of satisfaction. “Don’t fucking smoke those things,” he says. “They’re terrible for you.” And then he leans in to kiss Niall.

It’s an absolute disaster at first. He pushes too hard and Niall’s nice white teeth bite into his lip and his nose feels huge, and awkward, and Louis can’t for the life of him decide what to do with his hands. He’s just started to panic that they’ve made an irreparable fucking mess of their friendship when Niall sighs, the sound of it tinged with laughter, and it’s like he relaxes.

Louis puts his hands on either side of Niall’s face and strokes his cheeks with his thumbs, telling himself, _This is Niall, this is Niall,_ over and over again until the words stop sounding marvelous and unbelievable. _This is Niall._ Niall shuffles closer, tucking his fingertips into Louis’s jean pockets. Giddiness fizzes in Louis’s chest like champagne bubbles.

He doesn’t kiss like a girl. Louis’s used to kissing; he’s less used to _being_ kissed, and Niall gives as good as he gets. He sucks Louis’s lip into his mouth and slides his knee between Louis’s, and Louis seriously considers grinding against Niall’s thigh until he gets off in this shadowy alleyway. It’s all a bit much. Louis pushes Niall’s stupid hat off his head so he can comb his hair to the side the way he likes.

They stumble apart when a car pulls up and honks. Niall runs a hand through his hair and waves at the driver, his voice breathless. “Tony! I’m coming, mate.” He looks at Louis. _Invite me,_ Louis thinks. “Should you…d’you want to come with me?” Niall asks. He looks so uncertain in that moment, like he’s not the best hook up Louis’s had in ages and ages, and all they’ve done is _kiss._ It’s a little embarrassing, really.

“Sure,” Louis says. “Why not?” He grins.

Louis’s first thought when they clamber into the back of the car together and Niall’s warm, firm thigh presses up against his is how the hell he never noticed how fucking fit Niall is. His second thought is about whether or not there’s a partition they can roll up. He can’t decide which sounds better: Niall throwing one of those skinny gazelle legs across Louis’s and dropping his weight into his lap, or climbing into Niall’s lap himself and grinding against him till he cries.

Niall gives the driver his address and settles back in his seat. Louis fiddles with the controls on the door. “Which one of these is the partition?” he asks speculatively, and Niall laughs. He runs his palms over his face a few times. Louis watches him. Part of him is over the fucking moon that he snogged Niall and Niall kissed him back. Another part, an old, familiar, well-worn part, is just delighted to be near him again. Louis missed the permanent upward curve of his lips and the spray of freckles dotting his neck and the nervous tap-tapping of his fingers against his jeans. Niall’s a bit like Louis’s favorite song.

“So, like,” Niall starts. “We should probably talk.”

“Or we could shag,” Louis suggests brightly.

“Who says we can’t do both?” Niall asks. His tone is light but his eyes are serious, and Louis clocks it for what it is: Niall’s serious about _him._

Louis curls his fingers together till they hurt, and then he puts his hand on Niall’s knee. Niall’s legs spread ever so slightly, his bony knee digging into Louis’s thigh that little bit more. “Right,” says Louis. “Okay.”

He catches sight of himself in the rearview mirror. Louis spends most of the ride looking at himself next to Niall. A blush stains Niall’s fair skin; his hair’s a tousled mess, and both of their mouths are a stupid shade of red. Louis kissed a boy. Louis kissed one of his ex-band mates. You keep learning new things about yourself all the time, he supposes.

A passing streetlamp illuminates Niall’s face and Louis’s brain blurts, _he’s beautiful,_ and Louis decides, that’s that, then.

He follows Niall into his house. Niall leads him to the kitchen, where he pulls leftovers – quiche, it looks like – out of the fridge, and hands Louis a fork. “One hell of a seduction technique, lad,” Louis says, and tucks in. So what? It’s good.

“I, like,” Niall pops a nail into his mouth. Louis’s stomach clenches in anticipation. “I don’t want a casual shag, in case that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t quite think I’m up to shagging yet,” Louis says honestly. He’s still acclimating to this “wanting to rub his face all over Niall’s” thing.

Niall honestly looks a little relieved.  

Louis frowns. “Niall,” he asks. “Had you been wanting to kiss me?”

Niall’s voice is a hoarse whisper. “Yeah,” he says.

“How long?”

He chews on his bottom lip. “A long time.”

Louis blinks. “How come you never – why didn’t you –”

“You always had someone,” Niall says smoothly. “Or I did. We never got the timing right.”

“I’d have made the time,” Louis says. Niall laughs, and Louis smiles as he plunges on, “If you’d said, ‘hey, Louis mate, how about a snog?’ I’d have cleared out my schedule ages in advance. VIP, you are. Top of the list.”

Niall keeps chewing his nails to bits. “Didn’t want to risk it,” is all he says. And Louis realizes how hurtful his stupid “it could ruin everything” was. Nobody would know better than Niall, who weighs each decision so carefully before he makes it.

Who decided that Louis was worth it. It puts a lump in Louis’s throat.

“Well,” Louis casts about. “I hope what you saw of my family doesn’t scare you away from giving the thing a try. They’re not all so bad.”

Niall rolls his eyes and finally rounds the counter so he’s within arm’s reach. Louis basks in the rush of pride that he did something right. “Yours isn’t bad,” he says. “Briana says she’s worried about you.”

“You gossip about me,” Louis says crossly.

“We worry,” Niall shrugs.

Louis tips his chin up and looks at Niall, who’s stood close enough now that Louis could curve his fingers around the shell of Niall’s ear and pull him down for a kiss. It’s a surprise, still, how much he wants to. And it’s not very surprising at all. Louis reckons he was in love with all of them at one point.

It’s still taking a chance. And Louis thinks, _given a chance_ …

He snakes his hands up to Niall’s collar and Niall leans down to meet him.

 

***

 

Louis wakes up to the smell of coffee and the low of hum of golf on the telly. “Fuck’s sake,” he mutters, and rolls over. Weeks they’ve been at this, now. Will Niall ever run out of shitting golf to watch? He cracks his eyes open.

Niall glances down at him. He has a cereal bowl cradled in one big hand and a spoon in the other. His skinny, hairy legs stick out of the end of his boxers on top of the white duvet, and he’s sporting at least one enthusiastic love bite on his collarbones. Louis’s acclimation to rubbing his face all over Niall is really coming along.

He waits for the punch of desire in the bottom of his stomach to hit, like gulping down a bottle of water too fast after a gig, and it surprises him with its intensity. “I waited,” Niall says through a mouthful of cereal. He keeps crunching loudly. “It’s ten a.m. You’re wasting the day.”

“Okay, Bobby Horan,” Louis says. He lies there for a moment in bed next to one of his best friends. Time folds in on itself; he remembers doing this at the tender age of nineteen, and how hard he’d clung to Niall’s levity without wanting him to know.

Louis’s beginning to realize that he’s been his own worst enemy.

Niall snorts, and falls silent. Louis rolls over again so that his face is pressed into Niall’s skinny, hairy leg. He smells like fabric softener, and Louis closes his eyes, Niall’s fingers a light touch in his hair.

Louis keeps waiting for reality to kick in and remind him that this is Niall, who used to whinge about getting bread stuck in his braces and danced badly just for Zayn’s benefit and toted around a guitar everywhere he went. Louis’s loved him for so long, is all. It feels different, though. Louis’s always had a soft spot for Niall – who doesn’t? The guy’s like human kryptonite – but it feels different now. Like the hole in his chest where Niall used to fit has been stretched out, and its borders touch different feelings now; Louis still loves him like a dear friend but he can feel it rubbing against romantic love, too, and an intimacy so deep it scares him.

They still fuck around in the studio and hit golf balls into the pool and prank call Liam when they’re drunk, only usually they’ll go in for a kiss after.

Louis turns his cheek on Niall’s thigh and drags his fingers over Niall’s other leg, touching coarse hair and tanned skin. The scar cutting a groove down the middle of Niall’s knee is an old, healed thing now, though Niall shivers when Louis carefully traces its shape.

Niall lets Louis carry on his careful exploration without comment. His fingers comb through Louis’s untidy bedhead slowly, casually. When Louis’s had his full of Niall’s legs, he tips his head to the side. The skin of Niall’s stomach is smooth against his lips, soft and warm.

“Niall,” Louis says conversationally, “how do you feel about blowies?”

“In general?” Niall asks. He shifts his weight a little. “Or, like, right now?”

“Both,” Louis says. He presses another kiss to Niall’s stomach, and then he darts his tongue into Niall’s belly button. He jumps and knees Louis in the shoulder and they both laugh, though Louis tries to muffle his with a scowl.

“Lou,” Niall says, quiet and careful. His fingertips find the side of Louis’s face. “You sure about this?”

Louis doesn’t know how to explain that he wants to seize on this growing feeling in his chest like a surfer catching a wave, or a stowaway leaping onto a moving train before it leaves the station without him. He just knows he wants it. “Yes,” he says.

Niall looks at him for a long moment, and then he settles back against the headrest. “Reckon I like ‘em,” Niall says. He relaxes by degrees, his legs less like bony fenceposts, so Louis scoots over so that he’s proper fit between them. Louis’s next target is the sharp indentation next to Niall’s hip, the hard press of bone. Louis listens carefully to Niall’s breath change; he particularly likes the smarting little kisses Louis sucks into his skin with a quick press of teeth.

He’s a hell of a lot more fit than he’d been in the band, Louis decides. That must be it. Surely his arms were never this muscular before. Even his stomach’s harder than Louis remembers from bored scrimmages backstage before a show. It fills him with a distinct pleasure, like he’s a little kid with a brand new playground to explore, except with sex. Louis peels the waistband of Niall’s boxers away from his skin; he can feel the grooves from the elastic on his tongue.

He’s just pressing his thumb against Niall’s hipbone to watch the blood drain out and turn his skin white, only to pull his thumb away and watch the color rush right back in, when Niall says, “Generally I like my blowies to, er, happen below the waist.”

“Patience, Neil,” Louis says. He clears his throat. “Fill me in here. How do you like ‘em? Long and drawn out, or,” he pulls Niall’s waistband away again and sits back to watch the flush spread up Niall’s chest and to the apples of his cheeks. “Fast and furious?”

Niall laughs the same time as he groans; it’s one of Louis’s favorite sounds of all.

“I want to say something clever, but if it’s you givin’ it, I’d like it however, whatever,” Niall says. “Also, there’s not a lot of blood left in my brain.”

“Dear, sweet man,” Louis starts. He presses his palm to Niall’s cheek, intending to follow it up with something funny, and forgets what he was going to say. So he just leans in for a kiss. “Minty fresh,” Louis murmurs, and smiles. Niall cups his palm round the back of Louis’s neck and keeps the kiss slow and deep, his breath measured, and gradually Louis cottons on.

He slips his fingers into Niall’s pants and curls his fingers around Niall’s dick. He starts to make a comment about friendly hand jobs on the road, and then he gets distracted with how wet he is at the tip. Louis likes a super-slick, filthy glide, and they’re all about sharing, right? So he spreads it round till he’s got an easy glide going, his hand just this side of too loose.

He jacks Niall the way Niall’s kissing him, a rhythm they work up as easily as stepping into a song. It’d be so easy to get him off just like this, Louis can tell Niall’s inching closer to the edge with every twist of Louis’s wrist and tightening of his grip.

It’s just, the way Niall’s kissing him, and the way he keeps bucking minutely up into Louis’s grip – Louis doesn’t want it to end. He can’t stop looking at the furious blush spread over Niall’s skin, the way his arms flex, the sweep of eyelashes across his cheek. Louis’s head crowds with all the ways he hasn’t had a chance to touch him yet. 

“If you’re going to suck me off, you’re well near too late,” Niall says, so Louis stops teasing him, pulls his pants down his chicken legs, and guides Niall’s dick into his mouth. It’s bitter, is the first thing Louis thinks, along with an inarticulate _eurgh._ Jesus, if this tasted like chocolate syrup or curry, they’d be in business; as it is, Louis has to steel himself not to pull away. Gradually the taste fades and what he’s left with is someone he now fervently wants to get off, so Louis takes in as much as he can and redoubles the slick glide of his hand with the rest.

It _is_ a bit weird being on the giving end of a blowjob, but not in a bad way. Louis’s not neat about it, which doesn’t bother him at all; spit and precome coat his chin and he’s worked up a sweat even in the little he’s wearing, and all that really means is that he can smell Niall, too: musky, sweat-sweet and overripe, and Irish Springs soap. Louis pulls back to inspect his work, pleased to find Niall’s eyes at half-mast, his lips bit red.

As soon as he’s done sucking his dick, Louis thinks, he’s going to snog the hell out of him. He goes back in with real purpose, tonguing the slit like he likes, and bitterness explodes across Louis’s palate. He pulls back in surprise, stupidly, but Niall can’t stop now, and that’s how Louis gets a face full of come.

Louis blinks; he’s got some in his _eyelashes_ , for Christ’s sakes. “Niall,” he starts, and wonders how to continue.

“You idiot,” Niall laughs, though at least he sounds endeared. Louis wipes as much off as he can with his hand and smears it across Niall’s stomach, and then reason kicks in and he rubs the rest away with the edge of the blanket. Niall’s gone all soft and lax against the sheets, so Louis tidies him up, too, and then he leans in and snogs him like he wanted to, eager for Niall to taste himself. Louis’s been hard but now it feels like an urgent matter, especially with the cut of Niall’s hip _right there,_ practically begging to be humped.

“You’re gross,” Niall says.

“I didn’t come on my own face,” Louis says smartly. “Are you gonna pull me off, or am I going to do it?”

Niall tries, but it’s so clear that he’s all sex-addled and sleepy that it’s not nearly as tight and fast as Louis wants. So he just curls his fingers around Niall’s hand and does himself that way, his breath catching a little every time the head of his dick catches against the rough cotton of his pants. “C’mon, then,” Niall says drowsily, his palm drifting over Louis’s bum, and he comes just like that.

“Next time,” Niall says just before Louis drifts off, “it’s my turn.”

“Mm,” Louis agrees, and turns his face into Niall’s ribs.

 

***

 

He dreams about music. A pair of deft hands plays a set of scales on a set of white piano keys, the melody sharp and bright and a little sad, too. Louis wakes up with the melody still jangling in his head, the notes never quite settling down enough for Louis to put them on a page.

“The next big boyband” is in the recording studio bickering over who gets to stand where, like that’ll affect sound quality when they’ve all got their very own state of the art mics. Louis kicks back in his rolling office chair and watches them, a smile curling up the edges of his mouth. Fucking wankers, he thinks fondly.

Scouts found the band, who call themselves Stillwater, from middle America somewhere. You know, Oklahoma, or Idaho, or one of those ones that nobody really likes. They’re a five-piece, a sweet bunch of kids, and Louis has to make an effort not to see the parallels between them and One Direction. “The next big boyband.” Yeah, maybe.

Niall rings while the boys are going into their seventh take of their first song. Grateful for the break, Louis picks up and puts him on speaker.

“Christ, what’s that?” Niall asks.

“One Direction,” Louis answers cleverly. “A boyband,” he clarifies.

“They sound like a bunch of cats in heat,” Niall says generously.

Louis checks the levels. “That might actually – they don’t sound quite that bad,” he allows. The third treble slider’s pushed all the way up by Louis’s styrofoam box lunch. He adjusts it quickly. “What do you want?”

“Phone sex,” Niall says warmly. Louis glances around; his co-producer is in the corner doodling on a spare bit of paper, and the boys are so caught up in the marvel of the recording process that they probably wouldn’t even notice if Louis stopped trying to herd them along anyway. “You’re considering it, aren’t you?” Niall asks.

Louis glares at his phone. “It’s rude to tease, Niall.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Niall says. “I think it’s time you called Briana, mate.”

Louis’s easy, upbeat mood levels out, like gel solidifying. “I…”

“Miss Fred,” Niall says. His voice is gentle, at least. “I do too.”

Louis tries to answer him. The explanation is right there, on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t articulate it without feeling faintly ridiculous, and he doesn’t want to have to figure out what he means while Niall’s there. If it’s horrible, Louis at least wants the option of hiding it from him.

“Just think about it,” Niall says. “Think of all the ways I’ll reward you.”

And there’s no doubt it will be terrible, really. People – especially people who love you – don’t like to hear that you don’t love yourself.

Which is a bit ridiculous, really. Of course Louis loves himself, he’s his – he stumbles a bit here – his own biggest fan. Of course.

“Right,” Louis finally says. “I’ll bookmark my favorite pages in the Kama Sutra for you.”

Niall rings off with a laugh, and Louis sits for a moment in his rolly desk chair, his mood settled low, somewhere near his belly.

“Kinky,” his co-producer murmurs, a smile curling his lips, and Louis snorts and pockets his phone and tries to put the conversation out of his mind.

Oh, but he _does_ miss his kid. He worries at his and Niall’s conversation for the rest of the day and all the way through dinner, which is reheated Chinese leftovers and the latest financial reports from the label. He’s rifling through his brief for the latest numbers from the marketing department when he finds Jessie’s shortlist of shrinks.

“Fuck,” Louis says. He puts the paper down on the table, but it seems to be looking at him, so he tucks it back into his bag. He thinks about pulling it out in the middle of a meeting and takes it out again, and then he makes the mistake of looking down at it, and his eyes start reading. It’s all his eyes’ fault, really. “Fuck,” Louis says again. He calls the person at the top of the list and books an appointment.

His battered to-do list is down to just one item now: Freddie. They’ve spoken on the phone pretty much every day since Louis saw him last, and if Louis could just stop being so afraid of seeing him again, he’d be desperate for it. He just keeps waiting for Freddie to turn that corner and realize what a total screw-up his dad is, and the last person who really believes that Louis’s a superhero will unmask him, and Louis just…

He really misses his kid, is all.

“Can we go to the park tomorrow?” Freddie asks. He’s just finished a breathless summary of today’s game of musical chairs in Ms. Lindsay’s class that has Louis smiling so hard his face hurts. He can imagine Briana in the background of the call, her face going pinched.

Louis takes a deep breath. “Sure, love,” he says. “How about you have me round for dinner with Jake and your mum, and we’ll go after?”

“REALLY?” Freddie asks. His voice goes all high-pitched when he gets excited; it must be genetic. “Can we get ice cream after, too?”

Louis laughs. “Let me talk to your mum, kid.”

“Okey dokey,” Freddie says. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, mini me,” Louis says. He’s still smiling when Briana comes on.

“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” she says. “It’s in all the books, and it breaks his heart –”

Louis cuts her off gently. “I’m not,” he says. “I’m – I’m sorting myself out, I don’t -  I want –”

 _You were right I would’ve been bad for him_ and _I don’t want to be bad for him_ and _I’m sorry_ all get caught up together in his heart and what comes out is, “I’m his dad, Bria.”

“He’s growing up,” she says, finally. “I don’t want you to miss it.”

All the starch goes out of Louis’s bones. He slumps against his headboard. “Me, neither. I’m not going to go off the rails again, I promise. I’m seeing a therapist.”

Briana sounds surprised when she asks, “Really?”

“A grief counselor.” Louis shuts his eyes. He’d had half a mind not to show up to his appointment. But Briana’s sure to take him to task over it, and he’d have said anything to convince her.

“Okay,” Briana says. “You can come for dinner tomorrow.”

And, still, the thought of hugging his kid and smelling the top of his ruffled head fills Louis with liquid joy.

Louis brings a bottle of wine to dinner with Briana and Freddie and Jack. James. Jake, that’s right. Whatever. Jessie picked it out of the catalogue his favorite winery sent down from the vineyard in NorCal, so Louis knows it’s a good bottle. It’s good. He’s doing good.

Freddie flings the door open as Louis’s striding up the walk. He throws himself at his dad’s legs like a little football player – the American kind, not the British – which was just cute when he was a wee thing; now that he’s so much bigger, it sort of really hurts. Louis bends double to hug him back, putting his nose in Freddie’s bronze hair and stroking his skinny back.

He gets a petty rush of satisfaction out of looking up and seeing Bria stood next to Jim in the doorway, and Freddie wrapped tight around him. “Lovely to see you, too, little lad,” Louis says. He smacks a kiss to the side of Freddie’s head and Freddie suffers it with only the barest embarrassment. Then he’s tripping back up the walk to grab John’s hand.

“Dad, this is Jake,” says Freddie. “This is my dad. Dad, Jake knows _karate._ And he can even break a board with _just his hand._ ”

“Can he really?” Louis asks tartly. “How about with his head?”

Briana just says, “Louis.”

Louis makes himself take a breath. Then another one. Maybe if he takes deep breaths all night he won’t say anything at all.

Yeah, fat chance.

Louis holds his hand out for a handshake. Jake shakes his hand firmly, and then Louis hands them the wine. “Thank you for having me over.”

“Dad,” Freddie whinges into Louis’s leg. He sounds like he’s been trying to get his attention for a while. Even Louis tends to tune him out when he’s trying to get something else done; it’s just a matter of necessity. He smooths Fred’s hair back. It’s always so hard to stop touching the wee lad after so many days apart, and there’ll come a day when Freddie won’t want his dad to pick him up or kiss his head anymore. Louis’s got to enjoy it while he can. “Come see my new model train Jake helped me paint.”

“I’d love to, little lad,” Louis says. And, he finds, he really would.

He was worried, at first, about Freddie being there, but Briana had said it’d be nice for him to see his parents and one of his parents’ boyfriends getting along happily, and, as usual, Louis’s grateful to her for it. It’s a lot easier to keep himself in check when there’s a four-year-old pair of eyes watching his every move. He’s careful not to drink too much, too, so that he won’t embarrass himself. Or anyone else.

He can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it looks like fresh green grass and Freddie’s whoops echoing up into a fabulous LA sunset at the park, and he just has to keep it together a little while longer. After he can go back to Niall’s and hit as many golf balls as hard as he wants in Niall’s back garden. If Niall had told him about that part of golfing, Louis would’ve started going with him ages ago.

“So,” Jake starts over the salad. Two courses left, Louis tells himself, shoveling lettuce into his mouth. “You used to be in One Direction? What was that like?”

Having shoved an entire half a lettuce head into his mouth in one go, Louis has some time to think of how to answer while he chews. “Pretty great, yeah,” Louis says. It’s a massive understatement. “Those were some of the best years of my life.” There. He’s not lying, and he’s leaving the door open to the next few years to suck a little less.

“One Direction?” Freddie repeats. Louis blinks.

He’s known, probably, in the vague way kids know about their parents’ lives, but he’s not proper known. It’s a strange thing to think about when Freddie, to Louis, is so tied up in the band and in that last, harrowing year. Louis isn’t sure why the thought of Freddie never knowing about the band – _really_ knowing – makes his throat feel a little tight. He just knows that it does.

“Bit of a silly name, isn’t it?” Louis says lightly, and Jake and Briana laugh, and Louis manages on.

At the park, Louis kicks the ball toward Freddie, who manages to send it soaring over Louis’s head. Louis scoops him up and throws him over his shoulder, doing circles he’s so excited. Freddie laughs breathlessly in his ear. Louis lets him down gently and they set off for the ball together, Freddie’s fingers tangled with Louis’s. “You know I almost bought a soccer club once?” Louis asks.

Freddie scoffs. “No way!”

Louis nods. “The one near my hometown, yeah.” His eyes tingle in the corners; Louis ignores it. “I’ll show you someday.”

They kick the ball back and forth until the sun dips too low beneath the horizon to play anymore, and then Louis takes him home. He walks Freddie to the door, where Briana stands waiting. Louis crouches on the welcome mat. “I’ll see you soon, love,” Louis says.

Freddie threads his arms around Louis’s neck. “Love you, Dad,” he mumbles into Louis’s chest.

“Go on in and brush your teeth,” Briana says, and Freddie slips past her to climb the stairs. “I’m glad you came tonight.”

Louis thinks about making an inappropriate joke, and stops himself. “Me, too,” he admits. “You could do worse.”

She reaches out and squeezes his hand. “I could,” she says, and Louis knows she doesn’t just mean Jake. Louis slips his hands into his pockets and makes to go. “Give Niall my love,” she says. Louis cocks his head. “We’re in cahoots,” Briana explains.

Louis thinks about the people in his life conspiring to make him better, and he smiles. Then he scowls. “I’m still not going to give up smoking.”

“Good night, Louis.”

“Night,” Louis says.

Niall’s sat on his couch with a guitar on his lap when Louis gets in. Louis kicks off his shoes, throws his jacket in the direction of the ottoman, and drops down beside Niall, who takes his cue to curl his arms around Louis. “So?” he asks.

“Good,” Louis answers. He shuts his eyes. His _thank you_ goes unsaid, but he reckons Niall hears it all the same.

 

***

 

“You do realize we’re not, like, seventeen, right?” Niall asks doubtfully.

Louis throws the car into park and gives Niall his best scathing look. Typically, Niall looks not very much affected. “Niall,” he says. “I know you’re new to this whole ‘going steady’ thing, so let me refresh your memory: I’m your boyfriend, and romancing you is part of the deal.”

Niall thinks about this for a moment. Louis reaches into the backseat and digs around for his favorite Santa Cruz sweatshirt. He doesn’t get out boarding nearly as much as he’d like, but part of him – no matter how old he gets – can’t let go of the punk kid he’s always felt like he is at heart. Fall Out Boy and Green Day keep releasing albums, so at least Louis’s not the last loser left whose heart beats with punk rock. 

“It’s just,” Niall hedges. “There’s a County game on tonight…”

Louis puts his hand, tenderly, on the side of Niall’s face. Then he gives him a sweet little slap. “Let me romance you, please,” he says. Niall’s eyes dip down to Louis’s mouth. “Plus, I’m recording it for you, wanker.”

“Aw,” Niall coos. Happiness transforms his whole face from just handsome to radiant, and if Niall heard Louis thinking that, he’d cuff him upside the head. As it stands, Louis indulges himself peeking at Niall’s face while they kiss, eyeballing the laughter lines that show through more ever year and the tender tracing of lavender veins in his eyelids. A lyric pops into his head, something sweet and syrupy about _kissing you while the sun goes down_. Louis scoffs at it a little and then he tucks it away into a corner of his brain for later.

“Mmph,” Louis says against Niall’s mouth. “That reminds me. C’mon, you gotta see this.” He throws open his car door and lets in a rush of cool night air just so that he won’t sit here snogging Niall till the middle of the night. Louis grabs their bags of In-N-Out and boosts himself up onto the bonnet of his Range Rover, which is parked at the peak of one of the California foothills. From this rise, they can see the rambling spread of Los Angeles from one end to another until the city disappears into the blazing sun.

Niall whistles lowly. “Everything the light touches,” Niall starts, in his lowest register, “is our kingdom.”

Louis groans.

“A king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun,” Niall goes on, even as he settles next to Louis on the bonnet. “One day, Simba, the sun will set on my time here, and will rise with you as the new king.”

“Terrible,” Louis comments.

“Blame Freddie, it’s his favorite movie,” Niall says. He shoots Louis a smile, and Louis smiles back. Maybe there’s even a little bit of truth to what he’s said. Louis’s usually careful not to think about it unless he’s slightly stoned, or time feels like it does right now, like the second hand on the universe’s watch has been caught in the grip of some giant. It won’t last, but it’s precious time. The sun certainly doesn’t seem like it’s moving beneath the tops of Los Angeles’s tallest skyscrapers.

Niall elbows him. “What are you thinking about?”

“You,” Louis answers honestly. “Are you still gonna be rocking and rolling when we’re old?”

“Yeah,” says Niall. There’s no question. No doubt. _I’d do this the rest of my life, if I could._ “You?”

Louis just hums. Niall parcels out their French fries and animal sauce, and they eat in relative silence as the giant’s grip slips and the sun sinks lower in the sky. Darkness descends, and the pinpricks of light that are lit windows stand out light candles at a funeral service. “Looks like camera lights,” Niall murmurs.

It makes Louis look up, look again. He snorts. ‘Course that’s what Niall, seasoned performer, sees. Louis lets himself remember. “That’s what One Direction was,” Louis imagines saying. He wonders if he could explain it to Freddie this way. “Big, and bright, and blazing. Just like fireworks.”

Louis doesn’t say this, but in his head he’s thinking about Freddie at Fourth of July on the boardwalk, his little eyes wide as mirrors, slack-jawed with amazement. Louis spent the whole show looking at his son.

Sometimes you forget, is all. Forget what it looks like, the way the concussive sound of feels like it’s popping your ear drums, the way the lights leave marks on your eyes even after you shut them. It’s not so different from the stage at all. Amazing, how people don’t know they’ve felt that. He’d say, “And then the sun comes up.”

A new day. Someone else’s turn.

Louis glances sideways at Niall. “I’ll be here,” Louis says. Niall leans into him, so Louis circles his arm around Niall’s shoulders and hugs him close to his side.

“I know,” Niall says.

 

***

 

“You’ll do literally anything to avoid facing your problems, won’t you,” Louis dreams of that bartender back in Doncaster saying the night before his first therapy session. It’s a bit rude, really. Louis resolves to be quiet and mysterious, and then the silence in the office starts doing his mind in, so he tells the shrink about it.

She just smiles and tips her head to the side, an invitation to continue.

“Normally strangers aren’t so critical of my life decisions,” Louis says. He flexes his fingers together over his stomach, his heart rabbiting in his chest. “Not to my face, anyway.” The office is so quiet. A soft couch, two soft armchairs, two layers of knockoff Persian rugs, and a couple of tapestries really muffle the acoustics in here. It wouldn’t make a bad recording booth. “I don’t even know why I’m here,” Louis says.

“That’s okay,” the shrink, Jane, says. “You don’t have to know.”

He books another appointment.

 

***

 

Thanksgiving comes and goes with only a small dressing disaster. Ben and Meri throw a Late Late Show holiday party near the start of the month, so Louis dons his best trainers and he and Niall roll up in a sleek black limousine. It’s a bit posh, really, and all for effect. It still makes Louis laugh.

“It’s so good to see you boys,” James greets them. He sweeps them each into a tight hug, and Louis stops to have a chat with him while Niall goes off in search of drinks and gets pulled aside almost immediately. “You look great.”

“I’m trying,” Louis shrugs. He realizes it’s rather a lot to admit so he covers it up with a brisk, “I’ve got a year till I’m thirty, so I reckon it’s time.”

James actually looks pained. “Thirty, yeah,” he says. “That’s – old.” He takes a swig of his drink.

Louis mingles and schmoozes and tries to figure out how many of the people at this party read what all the gossip rags wrote about him when he went a bit sideways earlier this year. At least there’s that, if he fades into obscurity the way he thinks he will; no more shitty articles about him in the news. It puts a funny taste in his mouth, like old pennies. Louis goes looking for Niall.

He finds him tucked into a corner with an acid green cup in his hand, and Harry Styles lurking close by. Louis draws up short, but Harry’s seen him, so he drags himself the rest of the way forward. “Look at us,” he says. “Reunited by the power of an open bar and James Corden.”

“I’m actually here for Ben,” Harry says smoothly. Niall laughs, predictably.

“I’m here for Ruby,” Niall says. “Can you believe how big she’s got? Christ. She’ll be running things in a couple of years.”

Louis tips his head agreeably. Seeing Harry always makes him clam up tight. Harry eyeballs him through his overgrown mop of hair. He’s still wearing it like he’s never heard of a brush, or hair gel, or even hairspray. Lou would despair of all of them.

“Me and Harry were just talking about his tour,” Niall supplies. “I was telling him it’s a sick setup, mate, though the fireworks seem a bit over the top.”

“I wanted pink ones,” Harry smiles. “We couldn’t get them fair trade, though.”

Niall waves his drink around. “Ah, that, yeah. ‘Course. Tell you what, I had the worst time with the merchandising people getting a t-shirt design made that wasn’t just my face across someone’s chest.”

“It is such a good face, though,” Harry says, and reaches out to cuff his chin.

Louis wonders what to do with his hands. Part – maybe a big part – of the reason he hates being around Harry is that he always forgets where to put his hands.

And, well. Maybe he doesn’t like the way he’s always hanging all over Niall, either. Louis remembers this clearly from the band, Harry bending toward Niall like a flower toward the sun. Niall’s like that, though. He goes around like a beam of sunshine and doesn’t realize how dark the room was before he walked in.

“What about you?” Harry asks politely. “How’s producing, and that?”

It’s not insulting, exactly, but Louis’s hyperaware of the fact that _he’s_ not been on a sold-out world tour, and so he says, “I’m producing the next big boyband, or so they tell me.”

“Are they any good?” Harry asks, with a grin.

“No,” Louis says honestly.

Surprisingly, Harry lets out a little bark of laughter. “Well, we weren’t either, don’t you know.”

Louis tries to tamp down on a smile. Niall and Harry are both smiling at him, softly, and it’s all a bit – much. Louis begs off with some lame excuse about talking to a label exec and leaves them to it, where at least he can’t see it.

Niall, of course, can’t leave well enough alone. “Are you and Haz still, like,” he struggles for words. “I thought you didn’t let that stuff get to you anymore?”

“What, the papers? No,” Louis says. He keeps his hands folded neatly between his knees in the backseat of the cab. It’s dead opposite to the way he usually is, especially when Niall looks as good as he does tonight. He’s wearing a black jumper that brings out the ropey muscles in his arms and the shape of his chest, and ordinarily Louis would be rubbing his face raw against Niall’s stubble.

It’s a bit shit to explain to someone you feel small, is all.

“And…” Niall says. “And, like, I know…I just thought, like, when we were all there at X-Factor for –”

If Niall talks about this right now, Louis thinks, he’s going to open the door and fling himself into the street. “We’re alright, right? I mean, it’s fine.”

Niall goes quiet. Then, “I told him we were together.”

“ _What?_ ” Louis asks. Then, “Okay.” A moment later, “Why?”

“‘Cos I reckoned we are,” Niall says. He’s started chewing on his cuticle and jeez, how Louis wants out of this car. It’s such an unusual feeling for him. “And he’s our friend – one of our best. And, like. If – if the band –”

Louis whips his head around to look at him. “The band?” he repeats. “You said – I thought, like, what d’you mean the band?”

“I never said I wouldn’t want a reunion,” Niall says. He’s got that masklike, placid expression on his face now, like he gets in interviews sometimes. The car pulls up to a stop in front of Louis’s house, which is a bit of a bummer, because if this was Niall’s place maybe he could beg off and sneak away somewhere to get his head together.

As it stands, he goes in and makes a beeline for the bedroom so he can take these tight skinny jeans off. Niall leans against the doorjamb with his arms crossed in front of his chest, his face set. “Louis,” he starts.

“I’m feeling kind of weird right now,” Louis says. He and his therapist, Jane, are trying to improve his ability to express his feelings. So far, it’s been a wash. “Do you want to smoke a bowl?”

“I never lied to you,” Niall presses. Louis thinks, and sucks down a breath, fighting against the phantom feeling of wind brushing past him.

Louis doesn’t think before he says, “Yeah, but you didn’t say that you _did_ want to, and you’re like – if there’s anybody who, like, if anybody’s going to want to, it’s going to be you. Fuck, Niall, don’t pretend to be surprised! We all wanted a break and you didn’t, so don’t -”

“One person’s not a band,” Niall says.

“I know!” Louis shouts. He’s got his belt off and his jeans caught round his thighs, now; he looks a mess, and he knows it. He wrestles with his jeans, most of his words aimed at his knees. “Shit, duh.” Then, “This isn’t about the band.”

“Of course it is,” Niall argues. “Everything’s about the band. It’s like bloody Rome, all roads lead back to it.”

“It’s not!” Louis says. He feels stung, like Niall’s dangling this in front of him on purpose like a carrot and rabbit, only Louis’s on a treadmill, not going anywhere. “Don’t you get it, Niall? I’d kill to go back, but I can’t. I’d,” he blinks through sudden tears. “I spent five years with you lads away from my home and my family, five years I could’ve been – been taking the rubbish out for my mum and helping her with the girls and the twins, and…and instead I was off being a rubbish boybander, and what good came of that? I was meant to make her proud, and instead I just,” he makes an expansive gesture. “I flopped. I’m a huge fucking failure, Niall. D’you really need me to say it?”

Niall, for his part, looks like he’s been blindsided. “Nobody expected you to smash it after your mum –”

“She did,” Louis says. She _did._ “It was all for her, and I fucked it all up. And – don’t! For Christ’s sakes, Niall, don’t argue. You know it’s true.” He was supposed to make her proud. “And you, like – I don’t want to wait for you to see that, d’you get it? To see me.” Even though they’re true, it hurts to say the words like opening up an old scar.

“Is that why you keep pushing me away?” Niall asks. He sounds tired. Louis sympathizes. He’s tired of himself, too. “You think you don’t deserve me?”

Louis stares up at the overhead lights so he won’t cry. The light hurts his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. Oh, well. It was going to happen eventually, right? One Direction made his life, for a brief moment, miraculous. And he’d lost that time with his mum and done shit-all with the big fucking miracle of his life since. So maybe Louis always knew this was going to happen: he got lucky once, but he doesn’t deserve Niall, or Freddie, or his career. He was always living on borrowed time.

Niall’s shaking his head. “I can’t – I don’t even know where to begin.” He stares at Louis across the bedroom that’d started feeling more like _theirs,_ his eyes huge and so blue. God, Louis thinks regretfully, he’s such a beautiful man. “I don’t want to stop being together,” he says.

“Me, neither,” Louis says. That’s the problem; he _wants._ He gives up on getting his jeans off and spreads his hands. His eyes and throat burn and burn, but he pushes down the tears with savage force. “I think I just…need some time.”

The room goes quiet again. It’s a rude mockery of peaceful. Niall’s boots make a soft sound on the carpet like crushing snow, and then his hands come to rest on Louis’s shoulders.

“No,” he says. “I’m not going, and you’re not pushing me away,” Niall says. It takes Louis a moment to place where he’s seen that expression on his face before. Open, vulnerable, hurting, and undaunted. Suddenly Louis remembers watching Niall and Paul stare each other down backstage or back at the hotel, Niall’s knee hurting him so bad he could hardly stand to put his weight on it. Paul always wanted him to take a night off and rest. Niall never missed a show.

All the breath leaves Louis’s lungs in a rush. “Christ, Niall,” he says. “What do you even see in me?”

Niall’s mouth hitches up into an uneven smile. “You’ll figure it out.” He looks down. “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he mumbles, and shuts the door behind him.

Louis stands in the middle of his bedroom for a long moment without moving, and then he realizes that time hasn’t come to a stop. A meteor hasn’t destroyed the atmosphere and eradicated all life on earth, and everything hasn’t come to a crashing halt. It’s just Louis’s life that feels like it should. He hitches his jeans back up around his hips and does a slow loop around the bedroom, replaying the argument – had it been? It didn’t feel like it at the time – in his head till it feels brittle and smudged, like old film. There’s so much of Niall’s shit around.

Louis goes into his toilet and debates who to call. Right now, right at this minute, he’d give an arm and a leg to call his mum. Out of habit, he calls Danielle.

“Hello?” she answers.

“Hi,” Louis says, fingering the fringe of his quilt. “It’s, er, me. Louis. Tomlinson.”

“I know who you are,” Danielle says, her voice ticking upward to a laugh. “Why are you calling me, baby?”

And Louis answers, “I go to do it all the time, you know. It’s a bit like smoking. I don’t suppose I care for either very much anymore.”

“Wow,” Danielle drawls. “Thanks, honey.”

“I mean,” Louis starts, and Danielle says, “I do. I know.” “I really loved you,” Louis says, finally.

“I really loved you too,” Danielle says.

“Then why’d we break up?” Louis asks. He’s been wondering it for ages. It was like one moment she was his rock, and then she was collecting her things and he was finding little hair clips and empty tubes of lip gloss all over the place, and he doesn’t know what to do with them.

Danielle laughs. “You dumped me.”

“What?” Louis asks. _Huh?_

“I don’t know, it was something about focusing on your career, or your family – it didn’t make much sense.”

Louis pulls a cigarette from the crumpled pack in his pocket and pops it into his mouth. “Why’d you think I did it?”

“I don’t think you wanted me to see you like that,” Danielle says.

Louis listens to her breathe for a moment. Not for the first time, he wishes he could bottle it up or put it in a song, but for a different reason. He doesn’t ever want to forget how badly he’s screwed up. “I’m really sorry, Danielle.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “Not every love lasts forever, Louis.”

Louis closes his eyes. “Hah,” he says. “Okay. I’ll let you go.”

“Good boy.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Danielle says, and rings off.

Louis tosses his phone onto the bed and tips backward. He keeps telling himself not to listen for the jangle of Niall’s keys in the dish or the low hum of Fox Sports on the telly. He keeps listening for it all the same.

 

***

 

“Have you started writing again?” Louis’s therapist, Jane, asks him.

Louis stops drawing little footballs onto the pages of his crossword puzzle. He’d been early to session today, so he stopped at the shop across the street for a paper and a coffee. There’d been an article about Niall in it. Pap pics of him leaving a club, nothing particularly mentionable. He was wearing Louis’s Santa Cruz hoodie. He’s abroad for work, had looked at Louis and bit his lip and said, “I guess we should talk when I get back.”

Louis’s taking too much time. He knows it.

“Er…” Louis hedges. “Sort of? I mean, not really.” He shifts in his seat. “Well, to be honest with you. I keep dreaming of this one melody, kind of like,” Louis hums, but it doesn’t sound just right, “like that. I keep trying to get it down, but I can’t. Tried guitar, piano, you name it. So, no.”

“Maybe you don’t have to get it exactly right,” Jane says. “That’s what rough drafts are for, right?” Louis shrugs, then nods. It’s actually…not bad advice, necessarily. “Is there anything else you want to talk about?” Jane asks.

“No, erm, everything’s good,” Louis says. “I talked to Lottie and Fizzy and the twins the other day – both sets, I mean – we’re all set for me to go home for the holidays. I haven’t asked Briana yet if I can take Freddie, but we’ve been getting along great, so she might say yes. Like, there’s a solid sixty percent chance. Fifty. Eh, forty.”

Jane nods encouragingly. “And Niall? How are things with him?”

Louis picks at a loose thread in his jeans. “Good,” he answers, stretching the word out to comic proportions. Jane raises her eyebrow. “We’ve sort of been circling each other,” Louis confesses in a rush. He bites his lip. “It occurs to me – I think I might have, like, a slight self-destructive streak.”

It’s something he’s been thinking about a lot, actually. He wasn’t lying to Jane about the rest of his life, which is why it’s all so strange. Everything’s _great,_ but Louis’s got that feeling again, not unlike the one he had that March. “I feel like,” Louis says slowly. “Since my mum d- since she passed away,” he winces, “it’s like I’ve been free-falling, you know? And sometimes I can slow down, or it seems like someone’s there with me, but it always…” He makes a vague gesture with his hand.

“Did that start with your mom?” Jane asks thoughtfully.

It’s just the right question. Louis shifts in his seat, again, the pen in his grip sweat-slick. “Think so,” he says. “‘Cos, like, before, I had her. Y’know, when something went wrong, or I got fired, or I failed a test. She was there.”

“Can you think of a time where you most needed her?” she asks.

Louis rubs at his jeans. They’re so old, they’re soft as fleece. “Yeah,” he admits. “Before. A long time ago, y’know, it’s sort of ridiculous now. When there was a band, and Zayn was in the band, and he quit.”

“Why do you think you needed her most then?” Jane asks.

“Cos I didn’t see it coming,” Louis says. Jesus, the words hurt coming out. Is it supposed to hurt like this? “Just like with Danielle, and Eleanor.” Harry.  

Jane nods thoughtfully. “It sounds like you had a lot of people who have loved you,” she says. “Your mother, Harry, Eleanor, Zayn, Danielle whom we’ve talked about, Niall.”

Louis’s heart sinks. He’s so reminded of sitting in the principal’s office waiting to hear just how badly he’s failed. _I’m not stupid,_ he wants to say. _I promise._ “There’s something wrong with me,” Louis blurts. “Right? There must be.”

“Couldn’t you take their love as proof that there’s _not_ something wrong with you?” Jane asks. “Perhaps being blindsided as you were doesn’t mean that you didn’t love them well enough.”  

“Replay,” Louis says.

“What?”

Louis waves a hand. “Nothing, it’s something me and Liam used to say. Can you…say that again?”

Jane must not be asked to repeat herself very often. She fumbles about for a moment, glances down at the yellow legal pad in her lap, and tries, “If you loved them as well as you could, then isn’t their love proof that there’s not something wrong with you?”

That… Louis thinks about it. “It makes no fucking sense,” he says. “I don’t get it.”

“Which is it?” Jane counters. “That it doesn’t make sense, or that you don’t understand?”

“Both,” Louis says, sharpish. “That’s saying, like, that…”

“What?” she presses, gently.

It sounds an awful lot like, _That’s saying that I deserve to be happy_.

What a revolutionary fucking idea.

“How do I know I didn’t just get lucky?” Louis asks. “Or, like,” he folds his hands together and clasps them between his thighs. He feels flayed open, like a frog on the dissection table. It’s scary as shit. “How do I know that I’m not just, like, fooling them?”

Jane smiles. Louis realizes with a jolt that she’s beautiful. Maybe everybody’s beautiful when they’re smiling like that. “Give them a little credit, Louis,” she says.

Well, shit.

 

***

 

Louis has Freddie clinging to his back like a skinny little spider monkey to help hang garland from the banisters around Briana’s house. She’d invited him over to help decorate for Christmas, so Louis’s there. It’s surprisingly easy.

“Are we hanging mistletoe, pipsqueak?” Louis asks Freddie.

Freddie shrugs. “I dunno, Dad.”

“Go on, let’s ask your mum, then,” Louis says. He carries Freddie piggyback into the kitchen, where Bria and Tammi have their heads together over a recipe book.

“Why?” Briana asks, when Fred mentions mistletoe. “Are you going to try something?”

“Oh, yes,” Louis says. “I’ll tell you who my Christmas Valentine is. He’s about forty pounds. He has brown hair, and brown eyes, and Santa’s already told me he’s on the naughty list…” Freddie figures it out about halfway through and tries to drop down Louis’s back and make a run for it, but Louis gets his fingers into the laddy’s little armpits and tickles him till he’s red in the face. “But that’s alright,” Louis says. “He’s the love of my life.”

Freddie lays on the kitchen floor, looking up at his dad, pink-cheeked, breathless with laughter. Louis thinks, _Mum, you should see this kid,_ and then, _Maybe you have._

“Did Santa really say I’m on the naughty list?” Freddie asks.

“Oh, yes,” Louis says. “But we’ll leave some cookies out for him, and it’ll be fine.”

Freddie grins.

Louis waits till after a quick dinner of pizza before they go out to look at Christmas lights around the neighborhood to corner her in the hall and ask, all in a rush, “My sisters have been asking me round for Christmas and my birthday (you know, on Christmas Eve) and I’d like to take the little lad with me. They hardly know him. They should know him. He should know them.”

Briana smiles. She puts her hand on his forearm, and Louis stares into her face. He doesn’t dare look away. “Okay,” she says. “Then can I have him for New Year’s?”

“Only if you must,” Louis says. He moves in to give her a hug, and smacks a kiss to her forehead for good measure.

“Look, buddy, your mom and dad are under the mistletoe,” Jake says. He’s got Freddie kitted out in a coat and gloves on his shoulders, his hand curled securely around Freddie’s ankle.

Freddie says, “Ew.”

“Ew?” Louis repeats, affronted, and Briana laughs. Louis doesn’t think he’s ever seen such beautiful Christmas lights before.

 

***

 

Louis’s all set to fly out – he’s triple-checked with Jessie this time – when Liam activates the old email chain again.

 

To: _1 direction_

From: Boy Payno

_Lads! Are u cumming to my Xmas party??_

To: _1 direction_

From: Harry

 

_Please don’t spell it like that, Liam. All the love. x H._

To: _1 direction_

From: Boy Payno

 

_That’s a yes from Harry!! Hbu Louissss_

Louis stares at his phone, his thumb rubbing circles over the screen.

 

To: me

From: Harry

 

_Niall’s not coming. x H._

Louis flushes, then pales, then flushes again. He taps back a hasty reply in the group message thread and stuffs his phone back into his pocket. He’s got that new boyband in the booth today, and they’re not _that_ bad, once you get past how cheesy they are. They’re young, though. They might grow out of it.

 

To: _1 direction_

From: me

 

_Alright lads_

Louis’s only twenty minutes late to Liam’s party, which isn’t bad for him. It is a bit shit, though; they’re throwing it at their house, and even in Bel Air, street parking during a party is… Louis squints through the windshield. There’s two cars in Liam’s driveway. Louis recognizes Harry’s preposterous silver monstrosity, and Liam’s fatherly eco-smart car.

He’s been set up. Louis parks his car behind Harry’s and speed-dials Niall, who doesn’t pick up. “If this is your doing,” he starts, “I’m going to do a fucking murder. If this wasn’t you, steady on, hope you’re well, miss you, love you, bye.” Louis drops his phone into the cupholder and closes the door with perhaps a little more force than is necessary.

Liam answers the door after Louis’s angry-punched the buzzer just five or ten times.

“Louis!” he says, and grins.

In spite of himself, Louis’s heart melts a little. He and Liam aren’t as close as they used to be, but that’s Louis’s freshly minted self-destructive tendencies and more the simple fact of both of them being busy as hell. Louis’s missed him. Liam crushes Louis in a bear hug, and Louis flashes back on a time where Liam would hardly suffer to let Louis touch him, much less sweep him off his feet like this.

“Hey, bro,” Louis grins. He touches Liam’s face, wondering at the spackle of gray in his beard. His eyes still crinkle when he smiles. “Where are the ladies? Is little Penny Lane here?”

Liam groans aloud. “Would you _stop_ calling my daughter that,” he whinges. Then he smiles. “The girls are out at the shops today. It’s just us lads.”

“Very just us,” Louis remarks. He shrugs his coat off and hangs it up on the hooks beside the door. He reckons he might as well get comfortable. “I have to say, I was expecting a proper bash.”

“With a day’s notice?” Liam asks, cocking his head.

“Knowing you…” Harry trails off. He’s leaned against the doorjamb, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets. He even _looks_ cold. Harry’s not comfortable unless it’s absolutely scorching outside, though. “Hi, Louis.”

Louis does the usual glance-and-check for paps before he remembers that they’re quite alone. He still hesitates before he opens his arms to Harry for a hug. Harry holds on for longer than Louis expects. It feels a bit like hugging a fashion store mannequin, Harry’s so firm, though the way he snuffles into Louis’s neck is quite human.

“I cocked things up with Niall,” Louis admits readily. “But partly it’s your fault.”

“Why don’t we go to the living room, lads,” Liam sighs. “Cher really wanted you to see she’s redecorated.”

They get there. It’s a spacious room with thick velvet drapes over the windows and a crisp white couch angled artfully toward nothing in particular. “It looks exactly the same,” Louis says.

“Let’s go to the game room,” Liam agrees. The game room proves to be an even bigger room with a bunch of brown leather couches and a theater screen with a game system hooked up to it. Louis likes it immediately.

“Why haven’t I invited myself over sooner?” he asks. He wanders over to Liam’s shelves of video games. “This is _sick._ ”

Harry chimes in, “Apparently you’ve been busy shagging Niall,” which, right.

Louis pivots on his heel. “We were fine till he told you,” Louis says. “So, really, it’s your fault.”

“I didn’t even say anything!” Harry argues. His eyes are doing that infuriating twinkling thing that always makes him look a bit like a Disney prince. “How could I have upset things?”

“‘Cos,” Louis says. Fear beats a red tattoo against his chest and he wants to bury the truth beneath an avalanche of artfully crafted half-truths. He’s sort of tired of hurting people, though. So he opts to be honest. “I was afraid you were going to make him stop loving me,” Louis says.

Harry and Liam just stare. “What…?” Liam says, weakly.

Louis squares his shoulders. “Because,” he says. “When the fans started trying to ruin things between us, we let them. I let them.” Louis swallows. “And I just…” He could say so many things, really. For some reason, what his mind catches on is Harry’s knee bumping his for a split second on a too-small interview couch sometime near the end, when it all felt like it was going a bit tits up. Harry, laughing at Louis’s joke about Zayn. It’d felt like a reprieve. “It’d have been great to bash on him together,” Louis says. “But I didn’t want to think about you hating me that way, too. I let the moment slip by.”

Liam looks rather consternated. “Louis,” he starts, in his best Team Leader voice, the one he always used to energize the troops.

“That was years ago,” Harry says.

Louis sinks down onto Liam’s soft leather couch. “I’m tired of hating you for thinking you hated me,” Louis says. “‘Cos I was scared.”

Jesus Christ, if this is what blistering emotional honesty is like, Louis’s had quite enough. His head’s killing him. His stomach is so twisted up in knots he thinks it might suffocate him. And…it’s the only way forward. Louis’s so tired of being caught in an endless succession of middles. Unfinished business.

“You’re welcome,” is all Harry says.

Good fucking people, Louis thinks. He doesn’t –

Maybe he does deserve them. At least every now and then.

“Well, this is all nice and good, lads,” Liam says. He sits down next to Louis and Louis promptly goes to catch his face between his hands and squish him all up. “Ergh, okay, enough!” Liam laughs. “As I was saying,” his eyes sparkle between Louis’s palms. “We’re here to patch things up with Niall.”

Louis sighs. “So he didn’t have a hand in this.”

“Why are you saying it like that?” Harry asks.

“I might’ve left him a voicemail,” Louis answers evasively. “It’s fine. Really, lads, it’s alright. It’s not like we’re not on speaking terms.”

He thinks of Jane. _Couldn’t you take their love as proof that there’s_ not _something wrong with you?_ “I miss him,” Louis admits. Liam and Harry coo, so Louis adds, “and his dick,” just to hear them groan.

“He’d love this,” Liam says. He looks between Louis and Harry, who’s sat on the floor with his ankles crossed like a little kid. “Us together again. The lads.”

Harry smiles.

It’s just…it’s a bit daunting, is all. “I’ve a lot to make up for,” Louis confesses.

They spend the better part of two hours spitballing apology ideas back and forth. They decamp to the kitchen, where Liam makes them all cheese toasties with tomato slices, and then to the back garden, where Louis inspects Penelope’s new kiddy playhouse.

“This is all a bit daft,” Liam says suddenly, while Louis’s taking down the name of his architect. Freddie could use a playhouse. This is _rad._ “What are you good at?” he asks Louis, who exchanges a glance with Harry. He can see the answer in Harry’s eyes. _Uh, nothing?_ Louis aims a kick at his ankles. “Writing music,” Liam says. “Obviously. It’s dead romantic.”

“Yeah, Payno,” Harry agrees. “That’s actually, like, a really good idea.”

Liam puffs out his chest. “I’m well good at a big romantic gesture, lads,” he says.

Harry leans in to whisper to Louis, “Got a lot of experience,” and Louis laughs so loudly Liam’s dog lifts its head off its forepaws.

Liam gives them a disproving look.

He shows them to the recording studio he had installed in the basement. It’s a sweet setup, though Louis doesn’t know how he doesn’t go mad staying in his house for so long. They sit down opposite each other in rolly chairs, a notebook open on each of their knees, and déjà vu washes over Louis like time’s looping back in on itself.

Harry makes a camera with his hands. “2012, or 2019?” he asks, pretending to compare two pics.

Louis’s actually, maybe, sort of had a song he was thinking about. For Niall. You know, in case he ever started writing again. It’s whatever. Anyway, the point is that he’s never been able to nail down the harmony or land the hook. They work around those spots till the rest of the song is polished and gleaming, the lyrics sizzling at the tip of Louis’s tongue.

Really, it’s probably strange as shit to co-write a love song about one of your mates with _their_ mates. But if anyone understands what it is to love Niall, it’s Liam and Harry. If anyone’s to understand what Louis’s trying to say, it’s these two lads, and Niall. Liam solves the problem with the hook by layering a thundering bass beat under the verses and lifting the song up into the stratosphere with a jangling guitar solo he had picked out for one of his projects. “I’d rather you have it,” Liam says, almost shyly, when Louis protests taking his riff.

“What about this melody?” Harry asks.

“I’ve been dreaming about it,” Louis says. “It’s like,” he hums something, but it’s not quite right, so he tries again.

Harry sits upright suddenly, a bag of crisps spilling into his lap. Healthy eater, Louis’s left nut. “Do that first one again, then the second,” Harry says, so Louis does. “Now the first one again,” Harry says, ‘cept this time he hums the other part under Louis’s higher register.

“What the fuck,” Louis says. “That’s perfect.”

Harry bites back a smile. “You’ve been writing us music a long time,” he shrugs.

It’s a weird fucking thing, Louis thinks.

When he gets home, he’ll create a new folder on his laptop titled NEW 1D STUFF. He’ll drop odds and ends into it as time goes by. Just in case.

Strangely enough, he’s not really thinking of the band as he pipes his vocals into Liam’s sound booth. He’s thinking about Niall kicking him awake at three o’clock in the morning because he’s stolen all the blankets, and his stupid monk-like acid reflux diet, and his bony arse. He’s thinking about Niall halfway round the world right now, and hoping he’s not lonely.

They save the audio file to the flash drive on Louis’s key ring, and time snaps forward and back like a rubber band: then, now, someday, all overlapping. Louis shakes his head.

Right now, he has a plane to catch. “Shit, lads,” he says. “I’ve got to collect the little lad, we’re going abroad for Christmas.”

They huddle together for a scrawny group hug in Liam’s entryway. “I don’t think I could stop loving you if I tried,” Harry remarks, seemingly out of nowhere. Louis’s so proud of him, and Liam, and them, that he could single-handedly move mountains, probably.

“I’d rather not cry, thanks,” Louis says. He drags Harry in and smacks a kiss to Harry’s dumb, smiling forehead. Liam’s next, his eyes crinkling under Louis’s mouth. Then Louis’s running out the door to jump in his car.

Freddie’s waiting for him with his little case and his backpack on the curb when Louis pulls up. Briana’s sat beside him, and both have steaming mugs of hot chocolate cradled between their palms. “You’ll be freezing,” Louis exclaims. LA is so mild, they’re probably over-warm.

“Does it snow in London?” Freddie asks curiously.

Louis helps him take his backpack off and stow it in the boot. “Oh, yeah,” Louis says. “You’ll see.”

“Take care of yourselves,” Briana says. She leans in for a kiss to the cheek. Louis touches her face lightly, gently. Just ‘cos he can.

“You too,” he says.

 

***

 

Traveling with Freddie makes everything fresh and exciting again, so that Louis’s practically bouncing in his seat on their tiny charter plane to touch down in Doncaster.

“Dad,” Freddie tugs on Louis’s hand while they’re stood on the curb, waiting for Dan and Fizzy to pick them up.

Louis glances down at him. “What is it, buddy?”

“What if they don’t like me?” Freddie asks.

Louis kneels down. “You know what, then?” he asks seriously. “It’ll be their mistake.” Freddie smiles, and it feels like a rocket blasting off in Louis’s heart.

He wants so desperately to tell Niall about this moment, right now. About so many he’s missed over the past couple of weeks. He tried calling Niall on the plane over the Atlantic half a dozen times, but he didn’t pick up. Not that Louis can blame him, really.

Louis’s brother and sisters take to Freddie like a duck to water, naturally. The twins – the little ones – especially, who make him call them aunt and uncle for all of a day.

“So,” Lottie starts. She and Louis are stood on the front garden watching Freddie and the twins build a snowman out of the thin layer of sleet on the ground. The forecast reads nothing but fresh powder for days, but there’s no telling them to be patient. “How’s that list of yours going, then?” she asks.

Louis ruffles her hair, then peels her off the doorway so she’s tucked under his arm. “You know what?” he says. “It seems okay. I reckon everything might well be fine.”

Except that Niall, the stubborn bastard, won’t take his calls. Louis plots in between baking with his sisters and taking Freddie to the Rovers’ fields to kick the ball about in official jerseys and cleats. Finally, he thinks of a way around Niall’s block.

Unfortunately, it involves calling Nick Grimshaw. “Louis Tomlinson,” he crows when he picks up. Louis scowls at his phone. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Your mum,” Louis says brilliantly.

Grimmy laughs. “That sharp wit of yours, Tommo.”

Louis relents. “Would you believe I missed your voice on the radio?” he asks Nick. He leans against the breakfast bar and watches Phoebe and Lottie play a game of Monopoly with Freddie and Doris. It seems very slow going.

“My sweet, dulcet tones,” Nick agrees. “Mm. Maybe. Believe it or not, mate, I’ve missed yours, too.”

Louis reaches for a cigarette before he remembers he hasn’t got one. Seems like maybe he ought to quit. “About that…” he starts.

Louis’s birthday dawns still and quiet, fresh and amazingly clean under a layer of stark white snow. Louis plows a trail through the powder to the cemetery near the edge of town. His hands ache and ache, too vulnerable without any gloves on, but he’s not about to drop this bouquet. He’d rather catch frostbite.

The cemetery is perfectly motionless, which is to be expected, really. The snow has stopped for now, but it leaves a thick layer padding the ground. The snow muffles his steps; Louis feels a bit like a man on the moon, alone except for the footsteps marking where he’s come from and the rush of blood in his ears. Louis’s careful to step only over the pathways between gravesites, childhood ghost stories mixing with an adult sense of respect.

Jay’s grave is a simple thing, though Louis had pushed for something extravagant, something equal to her. Jay made her wishes clear, though; she’d wanted somewhere easy to visit. A rectangle of white marble inlaid with black marble, and a little stone bench carved with birds and flowers. Louis lays the bouquet down on the grave gingerly and perches on the bench.

“So,” he starts. “Sorry it took me so long to get here.” He pauses. “I really miss you.” He sniffles. “I, um,” he stops. “I just really miss you,” he says.

And he lets himself cry. He cries himself dry, feels like, and then he wipes his eyes. Louis has to laugh at himself. “Right, then,” he says. “So here’s what you missed. The little lad, Mum, you wouldn’t believe how big he is. How _smart,_ oh my God, if he can sit still like I never could – unless Niall recruits him for his band, I’ve told him I’ll kill him if he does but you never know, do you? His favorite subject is math…”

A fact: the people who love you want you to be happy.

Another fact: Louis’s trying to love himself.

A third fact: Louis’s the luckiest bloke who’s ever lived, probably.

He retraces his path in the snow to get back to his family’s house. Funny how it’s not home anymore, really; the sprawling McMansion with Freddie’s height marked on the doorjamb and Niall’s ridiculous humidifier is. In some ways, of course, this’ll always be home. Dan and the girls and Freddie and Ernie are in the kitchen reading the newspaper and listening to the Breakfast Show and playing Pokemon, respectively, when Louis gets in.

“Next up, this,” Louis hears Nick’s voice curl around the words, his heart stuttering in his chest, “is one Louis Tomlinson with a brand new track. Much love to you and yours this Christmas Eve, Louis, I look forward to having you on before any other radio show.” And Louis’s song starts playing.

Probably no one but him can hear Harry’s hummed harmony in the melody, or Liam’s particular, distinctive style in the bass drop before the hook, but Louis can. He can hear Niall all over the lyrics: a bit of sunshine on a rainy day, a fantastic movie stub remembered in a jacket pocket, an unexpected call from someone you love. All the best things, really; all the best parts of Louis’s life, made sweeter.

“We’ll be circulating this on air all weekend,” Grimmy says over the track’s slow fade out, “so do us a favor and tell all your friends about it.”

Louis’s family stares at him. “I’ve been dating Niall,” he says in the silence broken up only by the crackling hearth, the next song on the radio, and bacon sizzling in the skillet.

“Aw,” Phoebe says. Louis looks at her. “It’s just, like, there goes my chance with him,” she says, and shrugs. “What?”

“You aren’t ever allowed to date,” Louis says. “Ever. Anyone. Most especially my band mates.”

Lottie says, “Ex-band mates.”

And Louis shakes his head. “Nah. There’s no getting out of this thing.”

 

***

 

They make him tell them everything, of course. Well, not everything. But over gingerbread cookies and eggnog, Louis tells them. He struggles with where to begin; that time Niall texted him last spring, or the time Louis called just to catch up, or when Niall showed up at his door and they fell asleep in the front garden? In the end, he settles for somewhere in the middle. In a lot of ways, he supposes, there isn’t any real beginning or end. It’s all middle. So here’s part of the story…

  He tries once more to ring Niall before he goes to bed, but the snow outside is so thick that he can’t even get a signal. Louis burrows down under the covers and scrolls to Niall’s albums in his iTunes. Is it pitiful? Sure. But Louis’s a little pitiful, and lovelorn, and all the rest of it. It was never a bad thing.

He startles awake when the snowstorm mutates into a blizzard and thunders against the front door. Louis stumbles into Freddie in the hall, who’s clutching his novelty Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle flashlight and a spatula. “What?” Louis asks, articulately.

“Is it Santa?” Freddie asks, his eyes bright.

“Why do you need a spatula –” Louis starts, and stops. He shakes his head. “Later.” It sounded like maybe one of the patio chairs collided with the front door, or maybe a gust of wind blew it open. Louis tiptoes down the hall and to the front door to check. He gestures for Freddie to stay back just in case whatever it is is just propped up against the door, and then he flips the bolt and pulls the door open.

Someone blunders in shedding snow all over the foyer and cursing, faintly, in an Irish accent.

“Santa?” Freddie asks. He clutches the flashlight and spatula to his chest.

“Sorry, little lad,” says Niall. “Just me.”

“Niall!” Freddie says. He drops the flashlight and the spatula and throws himself into Niall’s numb arms, instead.

“Be gentle, Freddie, love, he looks half-frozen,” Louis says. He manages to shut the door against a building heap of snow and gale-force winds.

Niall says, “More than half, probably,” but he doesn’t make any move to put Freddie down.

“Did you see Santa?” Freddie asks.

“Erm, no,” Niall says. “He might be running late, what with the storm.”

Freddie nods sagely. “Right.”

Louis blinks, and Niall’s still there, so he finally manages to reboot his brain. “Come in – shit, Niall – come in, I’ll get the fire going, what the hell were you thinking?”

“Mainly I wasn’t,” Niall says. “You’ve got to give a bloke a warning before you drop a song on his head, Louis.”

“I tried,” Louis says. He peels Niall out of his coat and hangs it above the mantel to dry. His family’s got one of those nifty gas fireplaces, so all Louis has to do is flip a switch and turn the nozzle up. The color returns to Niall’s cheeks and hands gradually. He’s got Freddie in his lap, Freddie’s head tucked under his chin, the boy’s eyes already drooping to half-mast.

Louis gives himself a moment just to enjoy it. The love of his life, Louis thinks. Maybe he’s got a few.

“I’m angry with you,” Niall says, like he’s only just remembered.

“I know,” Louis says.

Niall goes on, “You can’t treat me like shit and just expect me to take it, Lou.”

“I know,” Louis says again.

“So,” Niall says. There’s a sudden note of curiosity, of vulnerability, in his voice. He adjusts his grip on Freddie, who’s gone to sleep in his arms. “So what was the song for, exactly?”

Louis cups Niall’s cold, bristly, achingly familiar face. “You make me want to be better,” he says.

Niall smiles.

 

***

 

Louis’s family is surprised to see Niall for only a moment on Christmas morning, and then there’s a brief scrimmage over who gets to hug him first.

Freddie clambers about on the carpet with the little twins passing out Santa’s presents, and then they all eat so much Christmas dinner that half the family passes out on various couches. Niall’s the first to drop off, his head tipped back and mouth open with that horrendous snore.

Louis puts his snow boots on and his gloves and hat. Freddie catches up with him as Louis’s shrugging his heavy coat on. “Where you going, Dad?” he asks.

Louis hesitated, and then he kneels to look Freddie in the eye. “To visit your grandma,” he says. He started that story yesterday; he can’t very well leave her on a cliffhanger.

“Grandma Jay?” Freddie asks.

Louis only nods.

Freddie bites his lip. “Can I come?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Louis says. “I’d love you to meet her.”

 

***

 

The heat of a California summer pushes them all out to the back garden and the pool. Niall stands at the grill in a pair of flip-flops, swim trunks, and Ray Bans, his shoulders pinking up the longer Louis looks at him.

Cher and Liam’s little girl Penny are paddling about in the pool. Penny has floaties on each arm and swim goggles strapped to her face; last Louis heard, she was deep-sea diving in the Atlantic Ocean. He can hear Harry inside helping make the salad, his low voice droning to Freddie, “I used to be a baker,” who makes a sound of intrigue.

Liam taps Louis’s beer bottle with his and leans in, conspiracy written all over his face. “Want to know something, Louis?”

“Depends,” Louis says. “ _Do_ I?”

Liam grins. “I started writing a new song last night. A new 1D song,” he says. Louis looks at his grinning, familiar, beloved face, and he smiles back. It feels like the start of a new story.

 

***

 

This is how Louis introduces Freddie to his mum; there’s not really any beginning, or end, so he just picks up somewhere in the middle and keeps going, like a sentence running on and on, and then at some point it becomes another story, and

**Author's Note:**

> i'd like to give a great big huge thank-you to the mods, kate and sabrina, for organizing this fic fest, and especially kate for helping me with this fic. it's so much better for you. thanks as well to all the other writers who participated and gave me a whole bunch of great new fics to read. also a very special thank you to sharon and arwa, the best beta readers anyone could ask for and truly amazing friends. lastly thank you to you for reading. <3
> 
> this fic has a great big tag [here](http://shutupsavanna.tumblr.com/tagged/to_the_end_of_the_night/), and the post for this fic is [here](https://niallspringsteen.tumblr.com/post/154437039482/to-the-end-of-the-night-on-ao3-louisniall-41k/). i'd love to hear from you.


End file.
